Electronic Book Review - science fictionhttp://electronicbookreview.com/tags/science-fiction
enReview of Karin Hoepker's No Maps for These Territories: Cities, Spaces, and Archeologies of the Future in William Gibsonhttp://electronicbookreview.com/thread/fictionspresent/unmapped
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Alex Link</div>
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<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2012-09-03</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p class="p1">Review of <strong><em>No Maps for These Territories: Cities, Spaces, and Archaeologies of the Future in William Gibson</em></strong>, Karin Hoepker, New York: Rodopi, 2011.</p>
<p class="p1">Karin Hoepker’s <strong><em>No Maps for These Territories</em></strong>, not to be confused with the 2001 Mark Neale documentary of the same name, is a welcome addition to a field in which “substantial research does not exactly abound” (49 n.3), namely, the work of William Gibson. This study generates “a typology of spatial formations within [William Gibson’s] future urban episteme” (17). It intends to “formulate a comprehensive description of the ways in which [Gibson’s] texts address spatiality and urban spatial formations” so as to create “a framework for ‘pattern recognition’” (17). While it occasionally mentions other work, this study limits itself primarily to Gibson’s first two trilogies: the Sprawl trilogy (<strong><em>Neuromancer</em></strong>, <strong><em>Count Zero</em></strong>, <strong><em>Mona Lisa Overdrive</em></strong>) and the Bridge trilogy (<strong><em>Virtual Light</em></strong>, <strong><em>Idoru</em></strong>, <strong><em>All Tomorrow’s Parties</em></strong>). Hoepker’s overall strategy is to take us through a series of spatial types, rather than to proceed through the novels one at a time. However, the early part of the study does devote most of its attention to the Sprawl trilogy, and the latter part to the Bridge trilogy. </p>
<p class="p1">Hoepker provides a brief overview of cartography and recent science fiction before delving into the promised typology. The study then presents us with an analysis of Sprawl broken down into urban and architectural patterns, with sustained considerations of the Hypermart in <strong><em>Count Zero</em></strong> and the Finn’s place as it appears throughout the Sprawl series. This consideration of Sprawl space, with its emphasis on junk and heterogeneity, gives way to a long-overdue and welcome analysis of the spatial significance of Joseph Cornell’s box art, which is often referenced by Gibson, especially in <strong><em>Count Zero</em></strong>. We return to a typology of architectural spaces and forms of inhabitation by examining the presence of arcologies in Gibson’s work, which generally take the form of “corporate arcologies,” or enclaves, and “low income housing” (127). Our last two sections are devoted to the artificial construction of the natural in Gibson’s landscapes, or what Hoepker refers to as Replascapes; and to the tension between the Bridge, on the one hand, and the spread of malls, franchises, and tourism on the other.</p>
<p class="p1">While the study promises to move from its typology to “the identification of potential interrelationships on the level of a metaorder” (20), it does not quite do so. One of the threads the volume does take up repeatedly, without quite weaving a tapestry with it, is the sense that one frequently encounters spaces in Gibson’s work that are organized from the top down, be they corporate arcologies or the massive mall called Container City. The corporate arcology, for example, is by turns “the visionary, master planned community” and “a potentially dystopian control space” (130). As one frequently finds in spatial studies that tend to rely on Michel Foucault, Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau, Hoepker opposes control spaces to ones like the Sprawl which, by contrast, are “excessive and hypertrophically heteroclite.” Sprawl spaces are resistant to the “order of grid space and territorial control” (88). Nevertheless, points of obvious comparison between, for example, the Bridge, the Hypermart, the Finn’s, the Sprawl, the Projects, and Cornell’s boxes go unexamined, and often unmentioned. It is unclear whether Hoepker sees these phenomena as iterations of the same thing, or significantly different, or somewhere in between.</p>
<p class="p1">Although connections between the elements of the typology are not clearly realized, Hoepker fully explores the manner in which Gibson’s “fictionally imagined spaces highlight their own genealogy” (28). With the introduction of a spatial type, Hoepker typically provides us with an extensive history of its place in the world. For example, in discussing arcologies, no mention is made of comparable enclaves in literature such as, perhaps most obviously, J.G. Ballard’s <strong><em>Running Wild</em></strong> or <strong><em>High-Rise</em></strong>. Instead, they are situated within a rather thorough discussion of the arcology as a utopian project, particularly with reference to Paolo Soleri framed by the thinking of Michel Foucault, David Harvey, and Fredric Jameson. Likewise, the discussion of the Replascape is situated within a brief history of the garden city. The study seems to have difficulty deciding whether the Sprawl is “a paradigm of future urbanity” (124) or the “new fabric” of the city today (125), such that at times it is unclear whether Hoepker is referring to the Sprawl, urban sprawl, or both.</p>
<p class="p1">That said, scholars looking for a close literary analysis of the significance of spatial formations in Gibson will most likely be best served by the book’s final section, which examines the relationship of the Bridge both to franchises and to Container City in <strong><em>Virtual Light</em></strong> and <strong><em>All Tomorrow’s Parties</em></strong>. It is here that a consideration of the impact of these various spaces on forms of inhabitation and their use in Gibson’s fiction come together clearly and forcefully in a manner that illuminates the way in which tensions in Gibson’s work play out spatially. Otherwise, the book’s other sections have surprisingly little to say about the role of these spatial formations in Gibson’s work. They are noted, grouped, situated in the history of American spatial thought, and compared to Foucauldian notions of space, but little is actually said about their place in their respective narratives.</p>
<p class="p1">I hesitate to write about books that this one might have been. However, so any avenues go unnoticed, or unexplored beyond simply noting them, that I should point out a few of the opportunities missed. For example, while it is intriguing to note that Turner, of <strong><em>Count Zero</em></strong>, seems to pay a steep psychological price in exchange for his freedom of movement, which is in a manner consistent with Michel de Certeau’s conception of the tactical, the observation remains undeveloped (148-9). While the discussion of what Hoepker, drawing on Koolhaas, calls Replascapes in Gibson, observes that the advent “of nanotechnology and artificial life creates hybrids capable of blurring the boundaries between object and living matter to an unknown extent” (178), there is no discussion of the Replascape’s relationship with the cyborg, evident from <strong><em>Neuromancer</em></strong>’s very opening paragraph, nor even of the uncanny, seemingly organic growth of buildings through nanotechnology in <strong><em>Idoru</em></strong>. The observation that “the Sprawl consists of a strange mixture of concrete, tangible materiality and elements of the atopically generic” (74) seems an especially useful but missed opportunity to explore the difference between spaces, their situation in a larger geographical framework, and the patterns of their inhabitation in relation to the patterns of “emplacement” (19) in which they participate. Lefebvre’s sense of perceived, conceived, and lived spaces would seem an apt point of entry here.</p>
<p class="p1">Perhaps the most significant element about which Hoepker remains silent is the place of metaphorical, telematic or virtual space in Gibson. We are inserted into virtual space right from the start in Gibson, yet Hoepker does not indicate why it goes unmentioned here. Since this work is “about spaces in fiction and, in a broader sense, about imagined spaces and their formation” (27-8) as “real-and-imagined” spaces, the study of virtual space would provide an opportunity for Hoepker to reflect further on her own connection of Gibson’s fictional spaces and architectural history. Furthermore, there are elements of Gibson’s virtual space that complicate Hoepker’s reading. For example, the Neuromancer AI in <strong><em>Neuromancer</em></strong> occupies a simulated natural landscape that also functions as a kind of afterlife for Linda, Case’s deceased love, and it is a space where its encodedness is dimly visible beneath its surface, making its own genealogy as an imagined space rather explicit. When one considers these elements of <strong><em>Neuromancer</em></strong>’s space in conjunction with the possibility, in <strong><em>Count Zero</em></strong>, that voodoo loas inhabit the matrix, a new dimension of space in Gibson opens up, which is the possibility that technological, artificial spaces make themselves available to religious experience. While Hoepker draws upon Henri Lefebvre’s conception of abstract space in her discussion, she never mentions its complement, absolute space: space unmediated by processes of capital, where opaque nature and religious experience reside as an ever-receding excess to those processes. Virtual spaces offer an intriguing response to this pair of Lefebvrean terms.</p>
<p class="p1">Sometimes, readers are asked to do a significant amount of work in order to follow Hoepker to these conclusions, which are then abandoned rather than considered. For example, we are taken through Foucault’s thoughts on Roussel, which are applied to the work of Joseph Cornell, so as to situate Marly’s considerations of the Boxmaker in <strong><em>Count Zero</em></strong>, but all, seemingly, simply to conclude that it is unclear whether the Boxmaker conceals a secret or presents us with the “opacity of the object world” (112). In fact, on the whole, <strong><em>No Maps for These Territories</em></strong> is a strenuous reading experience, particularly for two reasons: its unclear methodology, and its problematic editing at both the level of overall organization and simple accuracy. </p>
<p class="p1">First, regarding methodology, I must confess that I am honestly unable to tell whether <strong><em>No Maps for These Territories</em></strong> is intended to be experimental in its style. As a whole, it is so fragmented that it often risks losing the reader altogether. We dip in and out of Gibson abruptly, and theorists such as Kristeva (159), Barthes (162), Deleuze and Guattari (141-2), Bakhtin (213), Agamben (106), Haraway (182), Lukàcs (149), along with literary works that are tangentially related to Gibson at best, are introduced without contextualization or rationale, and disappear just as suddenly. Specialized terms — particularly for use in spatial analysis — are left undefined, incompletely introduced as in the case of the Lefebvrean pairing of abstract and absolute spatialities, or, as with Michel de Certeau’s “strategies” and “tactics,” defined (142-5) long after they are first introduced (26). This sense of fragmentation is compounded by writing that is strangely repetitive; for example, we are told five times that the geodesic domes of <strong><em>Count Zero</em></strong> produce microclimates, and in as many pages (56-60). Altogether, this style produces a sense of paralysis in the text, as we find ourselves constantly repeating ideas and switching to new ones, instead of developing them.</p>
<p class="p1">It seems, however, that this fragmentation may be deliberate. Unfortunately, that evidence comes long after many, I suspect, will have given up reading. While Hoepker mentions, in passing, her study’s “absence of an integrated theoretical framework” (22), it is only made explicit in the book’s final paragraph that what “is in many ways fundamental to this study and Gibson’s work, is a form of contrastive writing that is capable of layering the discrepant in ways that emphasize and creatively maintain the difference, without superimposing or collapsing one cartographic order upon the other” (231). It is true that this methodology is consistent with Hoepker’s reading of “Gibson’s sprawl space” as exemplary of the Foucauldian “heteroclite,” which is “beyond synthesis or homogenization” (49). At the same time, Hoepker notes that the heteroclite exists “in the absence of a conceivable common place” for its elements, and it “may still have to find a territory proper to it and continue to reside in the shifting configurations of the heterotopian in the meantime” (210). If this volume is indeed an experiment in heteroclite writing, it would seem that the “territory proper to it” — and I mean this in all seriousness — is on a bookshelf, unread. To read it is necessarily to subject it to the organizing logic of the reader, insofar as one can, as I am doing here.</p>
<p class="p2">If the writing strategy is deliberate, some discussion of this methodology is crucial, but is nowhere in evidence. One wonders, for example, about the compatibility between a taxonomic project such as the generation of a typology, and the play of contrastive writing; about its relevance to Gibson in particular; about the relationship between this superimposition of different theoretical models and, since Hoepker makes significant use of Fredric Jameson, Jamesonian “transcoding,” about the relative narrowness or breadth of the range of her selected texts; about the potential for theoretical texts to serve as a specialized kind of literature; about how this experiment would contribute to the staid postmodern trope of fragmentation; about how this methodology relates to Gibson’s heteroclite spaces particularly in their noted limitations (153, 207, 216) and to the Jamesonian “Utopian impulse” (163); and perhaps most importantly, about why one would want to conduct such an experiment. If the intention is to avoid a kind of coercive authoritativeness in criticism, then the experiment needs to at least consider the possibility that, after a generation of poststructuralist criticism, readers are likely already disinclined to regard critical studies in this manner.</p>
<p class="p1">Second, <strong><em>No Maps for These Territories</em></strong> contains so many errors that it becomes very difficult to trust the writing. Instead, one cannot help but suspect that perhaps the fragmentation is actually the result of error, and the sense that it might be by design comes to seem like an alibi. The volume teems with mistakes, from missing punctuation, to incompletely revised sentences, to variations in the spelling of a name or a term often on a single page (150, 202), to inconsistent page references and inaccurate quotations, to faulty syntax, to sudden changes of verb tense, to inconsistent capitalization (that, for example, contribute to the confusion between sprawl and the Sprawl), to incompletely revised and incoherent sentences, to simple typos, and more. It requires significant faith to believe that a study this unreliable at the level of simple writing is reliable conceptually.</p>
<p class="p1">In the end, it is unfortunate that while this study amasses such a prodigious arsenal of research, it does not go as far as it could beyond that first act of collection.</p>
<p class="p2">This work would benefit greatly from a reorganization and correction of its contents, a thorough exploration of the implications of its observations, and a clarification and thorough consideration of its methodology. Given that I spent much of my time completing or inferring ideas, analyses, and logical connections between sections and chapters, I can only say that, in its current form, <strong><em>No Maps for These Territories</em></strong> either demands much of readers for uncertain returns beyond, perhaps, what those readers themselves might bring; or it demands nothing of them beyond a bearing witness to its play.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/spatiality">spatiality</a>, <a href="/tags/gibson">gibson</a>, <a href="/tags/cyberpunk">cyberpunk</a>, <a href="/tags/science-fiction">science fiction</a>, <a href="/tags/michel-foucault">michel foucault</a>, <a href="/tags/fredric-jameson">fredric jameson</a></div></div></div>Mon, 16 Apr 2012 19:41:07 +0000Ryan Brooks2117 at http://electronicbookreview.comhttp://electronicbookreview.com/thread/fictionspresent/unmapped#commentsHistories of the Futurehttp://electronicbookreview.com/thread/technocapitalism/post-singular
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Steven Shaviro</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2003-06-22</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Bruce Sterling’s new nonfiction book, <span class="booktitle">Tomorrow Now</span>, is a genial work of futurological speculation. As an eminent science fiction writer, Sterling knows as well as anyone that it is utter folly to try to predict what the world will actually be like fifty years from now. What he does, instead, is to extrapolate from current trends in our technologically-driven culture, in order to sketch out the direction in which we are heading – leaving open the question of whether we will actually get there, as opposed to veering off on some unexpected tangent.</p>
<p>What we get in <span class="booktitle">Tomorrow Now</span> is a surprisingly sane and sensible view of politics, economics, culture, and technology in the 21st century. Sterling starts the book by rejecting the prophetic roles of Dr. Pangloss and Cassandra alike. He doesn’t think that all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds, but neither does he prophesy apocalyptic disaster. He prefers instead to draw from Shakespeare: Jacques’ “Seven Ages of Man” speech, from <span class="booktitle">As You Like It</span>, provides a framework for the book. <span class="booktitle">As You Like It</span> is “a great play for futurists,” Sterling suggests, because “it smoothly combines contradictions… The status quo is changing quickly and violently, because the central authority figure, Duke Frederick, is a paranoid lunatic” (xx). In such a situation – which is also very much ours – an image of life cycles and temporal continuity, such as the melancholy Jacques propounds, is the best way to set off the differences that the future is bound to bring.</p>
<p>Sterling is aware of the dangers of environmental destruction, and of the sort of New World Disorder we’ve gotten tastes of, recently, in places like Bosnia and Chechnya; but mostly he writes about what it will be like for us to muddle through the next fifty years, despite the rather extraordinary technological changes we are experiencing. Sterling rejects both the idea that there is nothing new under the sun, and that the changes we are going through are so radical as to mark an absolute break with the past.</p>
<p>Sterling’s discussion includes a lot of useful demystification. Twenty-first-century biotechnology will probably mean a lot of genetic redesign, as well as the engineering of bacteria to keep us in good health, and to produce all sorts of useful substances; but it won’t involve cloning and interspecies hybridization on a grand scale. Even the currently much-touted idea of parents genetically engineering their own offspring, to make them into superhumans, is extremely unlikely. For as Sterling cleverly points out, any parents who give their offspring a fixed genetic upgrade at birth will quickly find the technology outdated. What could be worse than having Windows 95 children, in an XP world? Genetic enhancements, if they become available, will more likely be applied on a piecemeal, ad hoc basis.</p>
<p>To take another example, Sterling agrees that our lived environment will probably become even more filled with pervasive computing devices than it is now. But he argues that to think that we will eventually download our minds into silicon devices, or that future-generation artificial intelligences will leave humanity in the dust, is to misunderstand the basic nature of computing. Computers perform specific functions, which will allow them to become parts of us, and thereby to extend our abilities in various directions; but the very fact that they are so useful to us means that it is silly to think they will replace us. Or to put this another way: Even if computers were to replace us, how would we ever notice? They can only replace us to the extent that they become us, or we become them. Perhaps this has happened already; in any case, apocalyptic scenarios are irrelevant.</p>
<p>Most importantly, Sterling reminds us (if we can be reminded of the future) that, even if a Singularity, or radical discontinuity in the human condition, were somehow to occur, we are mistaken to project our own apocalyptic fantasies onto it. For “the posthuman condition is banal. It is astounding, and eschatological, and ontological, but only by human standards…. By the new, post-Singularity standards, posthumans are just as bored and frustrated as humans ever were” (297).</p>
<p>The book is a useful antidote, therefore, to the excesses on both sides of discussions about the effects of new technologies. Sterling refutes the messianic proclamations of artificial intelligence visionaries like Hans Moravec and Ray Kurzweil, or for that matter of “DNA is everything” fanatics like James Watson. But he equally discredits the alarmism of the likes of Bill McKibben, who worries in a recent book that high technology is leading us to disaster.</p>
<p>Politically, <span class="booktitle">Tomorrow Now</span> is a bit more mainstream-liberal, or middle of the road, than I would wish. Sterling may well be right that there is no viable alternative, currently, to rampant global capitalism; but I wish he had more of a place for the hope for change, even if this hope is improbable. Sterling is certainly aware of the downside of the global capitalist system, in a way that “New Economy” boosters like Kevin Kelly (whom he warmly praises, but with a grain of salt) are not. But Sterling is too American-pragmatic to have anything like a vision of the structural violence of the world system, in the way that not only Marxists do, but non-Marxist social thinkers such as Manuel Castells as well.</p>
<p>Otherwise my only disappointment with this book is that in certain ways Sterling is too sane and sensible. What’s missing is the satirical thrust and the wild yet still plausible inventiveness of his science fiction novels. Sterling is right to deflate fantasies of transcendence, while at the same time reminding us that things will change, in ways that have enormous ramifications, and that we cannot imagine in advance. But I wish – because this is one of the things that I look to good science fiction writers, like Sterling, for – that he had extrapolated a bit further, taken more of a risk of making a fool of himself. Human existence is endlessly weird, as Sterling himself says explicitly. And it has been weird as long as we have been around; this weirdness isn’t just an invention of new digital technologies. But there isn’t as much of this weirdness in <span class="booktitle">Tomorrow Now</span> itself as I would wish. I guess that’s the peril of writing as intelligently as Sterling does, about something (the future) to which intelligence cannot reliably be applied, since it is unknowable in any case.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/shakespeare">shakespeare</a>, <a href="/tags/you-it">as you like it</a>, <a href="/tags/kevin-kelly">kevin kelly</a>, <a href="/tags/marx">marx</a>, <a href="/tags/manuel-castells">manuel castells</a>, <a href="/tags/united-states">united states</a>, <a href="/tags/america">america</a>, <a href="/tags/usa">usa</a>, <a href="/tags/hans-moravec">hans moravec</a>, <a href="/tags/ray-kurzweil">ray kurzweil</a>, <a href="/tags/james-watson">james watson</a>, <a href="/tags/bill-mckibben">bill mckibben</a>, <a href="/tags/politics">politics</a>, <a href="/tags/capitalism">capitalism</a>, <a href="/tags/technology">technology</a>, <a href="/tags/science-fiction">science fiction</a>, <a href="/tags/cyberpunk">cyberpunk</a>, <a href="/tags/liberalism">liberalism</a>, <a href="/tags/globalism">globalism</a>, <a href="/tags/pragmatism">pragmatism</a>, <a href="/tags"></a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator867 at http://electronicbookreview.comI'll be a postfeminist in a postpatriarchy, or, Can We Really Imagine Life after Feminism?http://electronicbookreview.com/thread/writingpostfeminism/%28fem%29sci-fi
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Lisa Yaszek</div>
</div>
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<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2005-01-29</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>When Elisabeth Joyce first asked me to write an essay for <span class="journaltitle">ebr</span> ‘s postfeminist thread I jumped at the opportunity. Although I first learned feminist principles from my parents as a child in the 1970s, and I continue to teach those principles to students in my gender studies classes at Georgia Tech today, I admit that my understanding of the term “postfeminism” has been somewhat hazy. As I began researching this issue and discussing it with my colleagues and students, I realized I was not alone. After all, “postfeminism” seems to be used in even more complex and contradictory ways than “feminism” itself: to herald a new era of (at least theoretical) equality between men and women, to explain the rise of a New Traditionalism that looks much like the old traditionalism of the antifeminist 1950s, to champion the possibility of unfettered individual choice for women outside conventional political categories, to make sense of the diverse needs of women in the integrated circuit of global capitalism, and, finally, to mark theoretical and epistemological shifts in feminism itself. As such, postfeminism seems to be simultaneously elegiac and celebratory, descriptive and proscriptive, a <span class="lightEmphasis">fait accompli</span> and an impossible dream.</p>
<p>My goal here is to begin making sense of postfeminism by mapping out its primary meanings for contemporary scholars and artists. Accordingly, in the first part of this essay I consider the multiple origin stories associated with postfeminism and how they inform the use of this term in three types of critical theory and aesthetic practice: feminist media studies, feminist literary and cultural theory, and contemporary women’s literature. In the second part of this essay I examine a fourth kind of critical and aesthetic practice that has long embraced the tenets of progressive postfeminism: feminist science fiction (SF).</p>
<p>The challenges inherent in pinning down any single meaning - or even several meanings - for postfeminism are perhaps best illustrated by the diversity of origin stories attached to the word itself. My own research uncovered at least seven such stories. The most common origin story posits that postfeminism first appeared in the <span class="journaltitle">New York Times Sunday Magazine</span> during the mid-1970s, where it was (rather prematurely) used to celebrate women’s newfound equality in the public sphere and thus the completion of all feminist reform (Robinson 273). <cite id="note_1" class="note">Elaine Tuttle Hansen more specifically claims that <span class="journaltitle">The New York Times</span> first used the term “postfeminism” in October 1982 rather than in the mid-1970s (5). Either way, it is interesting to note that <span class="journaltitle">Times</span> staff writers seem to be some of the most enthusiastic promoters of conservative postfeminism. For example, Tania Modleski begins her book <span class="booktitle">Feminism without Women: Culture and Criticism in a “Postfeminist” Age</span> with another example from the <span class="journaltitle">Times</span> in 1987, and I myself have counted at least half a dozen similar uses of the term in the <span class="journaltitle">Times</span> over the past two years.</cite> Other sources also date the emergence of this term to the 1970s and 1980s, but attribute its creation to either continental philosophers Maria-Antoinetta Macciocchi and Julia Kristeva or to British theorist Toril Moi (Russo 28; Kavka 29). In both cases, postfeminism is used to “advocate a feminism that would deconstruct the binary between equality-based or ‘liberal’ feminism and difference-based or “radical’ feminism” (Kavka 29). Still other accounts suggest that postfeminism “is foremost - historically speaking - a product of the interventions of women of color into the feminist debate” during the 1980s (Koenen 132). And perhaps the most surprising origin story attributes the term to a mid-1970s New Zealand bumper sticker that proclaimed “I’LL BE A POSTFEMINIST IN A POSTPATRIARCHY” (Kavka 29).</p>
<p>Although most postfeminism origin stories seem to have emerged in response to the revival of feminism in the 1960s and 1970s - making them, in essence, “post-second-wave-feminism” origin stories - at least two other accounts indicate that the term first appeared more than half a century previously in response to first-wave feminism. Following Susan Faludi, Amanda D. Lotz dates the first use of the term to the 1920s popular press, who used it to celebrate the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment and thus the “natural” conclusion of feminism itself. Elsewhere, Lillian S. Robinson argues that postfeminism emerged in 1919 when the editors of the American feminist journal <span class="journaltitle">Judy</span> rededicated the magazine to “human liberation beyond the now-resolved male-female dialectic” (276). Like many feminists today, then, the editors of <span class="journaltitle">Judy</span> saw feminism as a kind of analytic tool that could be applied to a range of social and political injustices beyond those faced specifically by women.</p>
<p>These diverse accounts may not provide us with a single, stable understanding of postfeminism, but they do suggest certain provocative trends in the concept’s history. As both the first- and second-wave stories clearly indicate, members of the mass media tend to use the term in a markedly different manner than feminists themselves. When journalists for <span class="journaltitle">The New York Times</span> or <span class="journaltitle">People</span> magazine write about postfeminism, they typically use the term in a very literal way: to describe the contemporary moment as one in which the goals of feminism have been achieved. In such accounts, this paves the way for a new era where women can follow in the footsteps of their feminist mothers and tough it out in the public sphere with their male counterparts - or, these same accounts suggest, contemporary women can be “truly” cutting edge and re-embrace older, seemingly simpler and more natural roles as homemakers (Probyn 152). Although this kind of new traditionalist rhetoric emerged in the 1980s in tandem with a more general backlash against feminism, feminist scholars such as Tania Modleski have been quick to point out that the two are not equivalent. If anything, New Traditionalist postfeminism is far more insidious than the backlash against feminism precisely because it “has been carried out not against feminism, but in its very name” (x).</p>
<p>Of course, feminist discussions of postfeminism also tend to cluster around historical periods marked by intense feminist activity. However, rather than using the term to celebrate the <span class="lightEmphasis">completion</span> of such activity, feminists typically use it to assess the current state of progressive women’s politics and to explore how these politics might be modified, elaborated upon, and even expanded in relation to other significant cultural theories and historical events. As such, these discussions mark the beginning of a new cycle of feminist activity. Such activity tends to fall into one of three broad categories: scholarly examinations of gender politics as they are represented in the mass media (what we might call empirical studies of postfeminism); critical elaborations of feminism in relation to other prominent literary and cultural theories (what we might call theoretical postfeminism); and finally, the search on the part of women creative writers for new narratives that make sense of women’s lives beyond those already identified by feminist scholars (what I will call literary postfeminism).</p>
<p>Feminist media studies scholars have long been interested in depictions of women in television, film, and, more recently, on the Internet. Over the past decade and a half, scholars working in this discipline have turned their attention to the explosion of female-centered shows and films that implicitly - and sometimes even explicitly - engage the history of feminism itself. A great deal of this new scholarship is cautionary, exploring how conservative notions of postfeminism and new traditionalism, as they are espoused by journalists working for <span class="journaltitle">The New York Times</span> and <span class="journaltitle">People</span> magazine, are reiterated in television shows such as L.A. Law and the Star Trek franchise and films, including <span class="booktitle">Thelma and Louise</span> and <span class="booktitle">Sense and Sensibility</span>. As Elspeth Probyn argues, these TV programs and films appropriate the feminist language of choice, shear it of its sociopolitical charge and then “hawk the home as “the natural choice’ - which means, of course, no choice” (152). Thus conservative, media-generated visions of postfeminism are guided by the implicit (and sometimes explicit) assumption that women <span class="lightEmphasis">can’t</span> have it all, that they must choose between: feminism and femininity (Moseley and Read 231); workplace and family (Probyn 147); protest against patriarchy and participation in romance and marriage (Samuelian 46); “crazy” collective political action and “more balanced” individual solutions (Press 11). In essence, then, conservative media postfeminism offers its viewers a depoliticized notion of choice that ultimately reinforces a patriarchal and capitalist status quo.</p>
<p>In the late 1990s feminist media scholars began to explore a somewhat more progressive trend in popular representations of postfeminism, noting that new shows offered viewers more thoughtful assessments of feminism’s legacy. As Rachel Moseley and Jacinda Read argue, such shows “[do] not centre on a conflict between career and personal life, but instead on the struggle to hold them together” (232). Additionally, Amanda D. Lotz suggests, progressive postfeminist shows “explore the diverse relations to power women inhabit” by investigating the impact of race and class on gender and through sympathetic treatments of the search for a suitable sexual partner and the challenges of single motherhood (115). Of course, as even the most ardent advocate of these newer postfeminist shows acknowledges, they are certainly not in the majority, nor are their political allegiances always consistent or clear. Nonetheless, they provide important insight into the diverse ways that feminist ideas are represented in the mass media.</p>
<p>As Lotz suggests in her review of recent media scholarship, critical insights into the progressive possibilities of postfeminist television and film are themselves direct results of new developments in literary and cultural theories of postfeminism. Much like other theoretical “posts,” theoretical postfeminism is not just about what historically comes after feminism. Rather, it encompasses a variety of attempts to identify and critique certain problematic assumptions in feminism, just as postmodernism critiques modernism and postcolonialism critiques colonialism. For example, Bette Mandl identifies two problems that have become central to postfeminist mediations on second-wave feminism: the discursive conflation of women’s community with family (which sometimes created unbearable tensions between self-development and altruistic sisterhood) and an emphasis on the biological homogeneity of all women which failed to acknowledge the specificities of race and class or the possibility of fruitful alliances between women and gays in any sustained way (124, 126). Not surprisingly then, theoretical postfeminists including Judith Butler, Anne Fausto-Sterling, and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari ask us to think about sex and gender as “political rather than biological categories” that exist “as a multiplicity of spaces along a line of continuum rather than as a simple opposition” and thus to imagine a new kind of progressive politics “that is pulsional, equivocal, [and] flirtational” rather than unified and universal (Davis 132, 133). <cite id="note_2" class="note">For similar descriptions of theoretical postfeminism, see also Misha Kavka’s “Feminism, Ethics, and History, or What Is the “Post’ in Postfeminism?” and Lisa Joyce’s <a href="/writingpostfeminism/postfeminism" class="internal">Writing Postfeminism</a>. While Kavka focuses primarily on the impact of continental philosophy on postfeminism, Joyce provides readers with a succinct discussion of postfeminism that seems more indebted to the North American tradition of pragmatic feminist criticism.</cite></p>
<p>Given this emphasis on multiple, denaturalized subjectivities and fluid, nonlinear political strategies, it is not surprising that theoretical postfeminism is characterized by a sustained interest in reassessing feminism through the critical lens of poststructuralist and postmodern thinking. For example, postfeminists often invoke Derrida and Lacan as well as their female counterparts Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, and Luce Irigaray to demonstrate how earlier modes of feminism posited an inevitable opposition between phallocentrism and gynocentrism without acknowledging how the two are bound together by a shared investment in logocentrism. The task for postfeminists, as Diane Mowery Davis sees it, is to recognize this commonality and then to move beyond it by embracing a “third position that is not really a position at all but a perpetual mobility”; indeed, for Davis this is key to the development of flirtational politics (130). <cite id="note_3" class="note">For further discussion of the relations between feminism, continental theory, and postfeminism, see also Mary Russo’s “Notes on “Post-Feminism.’”</cite> Elsewhere, Anne Koenen argues that some of the most persuasive visions of postfeminism have come from feminists of color such as bell hooks, Barbara Christian, and Gloria Andalzua, who appropriate “male, pale, and Yale” theories about the fragmentation of the subject, the deconstruction of the center, and changing notions of literary canonization, modifying them to “suit the context of the margin and to evade the blind spots of those theories” (131). In the hands of such scholars, postfeminism becomes a crucial means by which to articulate the multiplicity of subject positions that modern women experience - and the multiple ways that they theorize this experience for themselves and others (135).</p>
<p>Finally, theoretical postfeminism provides scholars with an opportunity to rethink feminist praxis in relation to the advanced sciences and technologies that increasingly shape life in a postindustrial era. In 1985 Donna Haraway’s groundbreaking “Cyborg Manifesto” urged feminists to begin seriously considering the promises and perils of a technoscientific culture that reorganizes women’s relations to themselves, their families, and their communities in the name of global capitalism. Haraway’s arguments have inspired an explosion of feminist “cyborg studies” in the past two decades, especially as they pertain to what are sometimes called postfeminist appropriations of electronic writing technologies. Indeed, one of the primary goals of the original <span class="journaltitle">ebr</span> postfeminist weave was just that: to show how “women are just as involved in the electronic frontier of the Web as men are” (<a href="/writingpostfeminism/postfeminism" class="internal">Joyce</a>, para. 1). Electronic writing technologies have become increasingly central to postfeminist thinking about contemporary women’s writing, I believe, because they seem to be ideal mediums through which to explore the multiple subjectivities and histories that postfeminists theorize about elsewhere. <cite id="note_4" class="note">For scholarly discussions of electronic technologies and women’s writing, see Anne Balsamo’s “Feminism for the Incurably Informed” and Janine Marchessault and Kim Sawchuk’s <span class="booktitle">Wild Science: Reading Feminism, Medicine and the Media</span>. For discussions oriented toward a more general audience, see Carla Sinclair’s <span class="booktitle">Netchick: A Smart-Girl Guide to the Wired World</span> and Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards’ <span class="booktitle">Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future</span>.</cite></p>
<p>Of course, the hope for new narrative forms that adequately capture the diverse experience of contemporary women is not limited to the realm of electronic writing. Rather, it is central to much of the literary postfeminism characteristic of women’s drama, poetry, and fiction of the past several decades. As theater critic Sue-Ellen Case notes, women artists often resist feminism “as an imposition or confinement of their creative processes” (qt. in Mandl 120). Elsewhere, Canadian poet Anne McLean elaborates on this resistance from the perspective of the artist herself, opposing a rich and diverse Western poetic tradition based on “human and self-knowledge” - including self-knowledge about “the worst aspects of what is said about us” - to what she perceives as the “horrifying puritanism” of feminist writing (95). For McLean, this puritanism derives from the feminist imperative to write about just one female archetype, the New Woman, to the exclusion of all other possibilities (96). Here, then, McLean clearly articulates the writer’s concern that feminism might limit her creative possibilities.</p>
<p>So what, then, might come after feminist (specifically second-wave feminist) writing? What might a postfeminist literature look like? Some of the most provocative answers come from Cris Mazza, editor of the popular postfeminist <span class="booktitle">Chick-Lit</span> anthologies (including 1995’s <span class="booktitle">Chick-Lit: Postfeminist Fiction</span> and 1996’s <span class="booktitle">Chick-Lit2: No Chick-Vics</span>). Indeed, Mazza notes that the <span class="booktitle">Chick-Lit</span> anthologies were specifically designed to introduce readers to new women authors who were using experimental narrative forms to depict their hopes and fears “without having to live up to standards imposed by either a persistent patriarchal world or the old feminist insistence that female characters achieve self-empowerment” (104-5). Much like her counterparts in theater and poetry, then, Mazza’s postfeminism is grounded in a specific critique of second-wave feminism as limiting the narrative options available to women writers.</p>
<p>At the same time, Mazza goes beyond her counterparts by specifically describing not just what postfeminist writing reacts against - too many stories about superwomen and too many stories about women as victims - but what it actually looks like:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">It’s writing that says women are independent and confident but not lacking in their share of human weakness and not necessarily self-empowered; that they are dealing with who they’ve made themselves into rather than blaming the rest of the world; that women can use and abuse another human being as well as anyone; that women can be conflicted about what they want and therefore get nothing; that women can love until they hurt someone, turn their own hurt into love, refuse to love, or even ignore the notion of love completely as they confront the other 90 percent of life. Postfeminist writing says female characters don’t have to be superhuman in order to be interesting. Just human. (105)</p>
<p>For Mazza and her co-editors Jeffrey DeShell and Elisabeth Sheffield, postfeminist literature might well derive from a specific critique of feminism, but it is decidedly not antifeminist; indeed, it has the honorable goal of turning “laughter <span class="lightEmphasis">at</span> a woman’s concerns into laughter <span class="lightEmphasis">with</span> a woman” (104). As such, Mazza ultimately positions postfeminist literature as an enactment of the utopian longings inherent in the liberal humanist feminism that has permeated much of American history, including second-wave feminism itself: the simple but profound desire to see women as fully developed people. <cite id="note_5" class="note">For further discussion of the <span class="booktitle">Chick-Lit</span> anthologies and literary postfeminism see Mazza’s essay for <span class="journaltitle">ebr</span>, <a href="/writingpostfeminism/post-traumatic" class="internal">No Victims: The Anti-Theme</a>, as well as Diane Goodman’s <a href="/writingpostfeminism/gutsy" class="internal">What is Chick-Lit?</a> and Elisabeth Sheffield’s <a href="/writingpostfeminism/denotative" class="internal">Postfeminist Fiction</a> (both of which are also posted on in <span class="journaltitle">ebr</span>). For explorations of postfeminism in other contemporary women’s writing, see Paul Christian Jones’s “A Re-Awakening: Anne Tyler’s Postfeminist Edna Pointellier in <span class="booktitle">Ladder of Years</span> “; Janice Doane’s “Undoing Feminism: From the Preoedipal to Postfeminism in Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles”; and Michelle Comstock’s “Grrrl Zine Networks: Re-Composing Spaces of Authority, Gender, and Culture.”</cite></p>
<p>I am particularly interested in Mazza’s comments about postfeminist literature because she provides one of the most extensive discussions of this subject and because as an established author in her own right, she receives a good deal more publicity than her academic counterparts. As such, I believe it is important for us to carefully consider the promises and perils of postfeminism as she articulates it. My first concern has to do with the term postfeminism itself. Given the trickiness of the word - especially as it is bandied about by the popular press and in the mass media - why not simply call this new cycle of women’s theory and praxis “third-wave feminism”? Of course, many postfeminists - including Mazza herself - are beginning to do just that. So why didn’t this happen sooner? The answer lies in the recent history of feminism itself: Discussions of postfeminism began in the 1980s on the heels of second-wave feminism and reached their pinnacle with the <span class="booktitle">Chick-Lit</span> anthologies in the mid-1990s. This is precisely when the phrase “third-wave feminism” first appeared in Rebecca Walker’s <span class="booktitle">To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism</span> (1995). More recently, Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards have popularized the phrase in their treatise <span class="booktitle">Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future</span> (2000) and in their online work for feminist.org. For such authors, the phrase third-wave feminism is preferable to postfeminism precisely because it invokes the long history of collective feminist action in America, including its continued importance for women in the present and, presumably, the future as well.</p>
<p>My second concern has to do with the way postfeminism seems to invoke a “blame-the-victim” mentality in even its most thoughtful and articulate champions. As Bette Mandl notes, when postfeminist scholars and artists focus their attention on the disappointments of second-wave feminism, they run the risk of simply repeating the rhetoric of the popular press and suggesting that if women have failed to achieve their political goals, it is due to problems inherent in feminism rather than due to the intransigence of patriarchal society itself (124). I found this to be particularly apparent in Cris Mazza’s writing. For example, while I certainly share Mazza’s desire for a new kind of literature that depicts women as more than one-dimensional victims or superheroes, I am surprised by the extent to which the victim-and-recovery theme informs her discussion of Chick-Lit. In essence, Mazza casts the struggle to create the <span class="booktitle">Chick-Lit</span> anthologies as one in which she and a few other brave souls must struggle out from under the oppressive dictates of an overly-idealistic feminism that has become so narrow and prescriptive in its thinking that it has, ultimately, been co-opted into patriarchy itself. Although Mazza insists that she and her cohorts are not antifeminists, then at best literary postfeminism seems to be apolitical and afeminist. At worst, it places creative writers in an adversarial relation to the entire history of feminism.</p>
<p>Of course, the question remains: if Mazza and other literary postfeminists had called themselves third-wave feminists, would anything have been different? I cannot help but think that the answer to this question is a resounding yes. When we think about the long history of feminism as stretching from Mary Wollstonecraft’s 1792 manifesto “A Vindication of the Rights of Women” to the present, then we are invited to think about our own hopes and fears not just in relation to second-wave feminism but also in relation to the 175 years of feminist activity that precede it. Furthermore, the very notion of feminist waves is fruitful because it encourages us to think about feminist activity as something that changes over time in relation to specific historical and material conditions, rather than as an ahistorical, monolithic movement that is opposed to any kind of innovation or change. I myself would love to know how authors like Mazza see their work in relation to other waves of feminism and feminist narrative practice: how do the Chick-Lit anthologies compare with, say, Virginia Woolf’s <span class="booktitle">Mrs. Dalloway</span>, a feminist classic that quietly celebrates the ordinary life of an urban housewife who is neither a superwoman nor a victim? Mazza herself admits that she has had a difficult time explaining the <span class="journaltitle">Chick-Lit</span> anthologies to her colleagues in English and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois (108). Perhaps placing them in a larger historical context might have mitigated these difficulties.</p>
<p>Regardless of whether we call it postfeminism or third-wave feminism, the creative writers’ call for new modes of narrative that enable us to see women as fully developed people rather than abstract superheroes or victims is a powerful one. Accordingly, in the final section of this essay I want to consider another area of literary production where authors have been imagining powerful postfeminist futures since the advent of second-wave feminism: in feminist science fiction (SF), especially as it is written by gay and lesbian authors. <cite id="note_6" class="note">There are, of course, a number of straight feminist SF authors who also explore the possibility of postpatriarchal worlds, including Octavia Butler (whose Xenogenesis trilogy explores human-alien hybrid families comprised of five parents with three distinct genders), Pat Cadigan (who speculates about the impact of virtual reality on conventional notions of sex and gender in her cyberpunk detective novels), and John Varley (who imagines far futures where men and women use advanced technologies to change their sex and invent new gendered identities on a regular basis). Here, however, I have chosen to focus on gay and lesbian authors because they have used SF to imagine postpatriarchy in some of the most groundbreaking and consistently challenging ways.</cite> Much like their Chick-Lit counterparts, such authors offer readers visions of worlds peopled by women (and men) who clearly depart from conventional expectations of sex and gender. They do so, however, by approaching postfeminism itself from a radically different perspective. Rather than asking, “what comes after feminism?” SF authors typically pursue the possibilities inherent in the claim that “I’ll be a postfeminist in a postpatriarchy.” As such, they ask us to think not just within the present moment of incomplete feminist gains but more provocatively, about what might come after the completion of feminist projects and the dismantling of patriarchy itself.</p>
<p>SF is particularly well suited to this kind of speculation because, as SF author and critic Pamela Sargent puts it:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Other literature can show us women imprisoned by attitudes toward them, at odds with what is expected of them, or making the best of their situation in present or past societies…. sf and fantasy literature can show us women in entirely new or strange surroundings. <span class="lightEmphasis">It can explore what we might become if and when the present restrictions on our lives vanish, or show us new problems or restrictions that might arise</span>. (lx)</p>
<p>Sargent’s comments here can help us better understand both mainstream authors’ reluctance to ally themselves with feminist agendas and feminist authors’ interest in popular or paraliteratures. For the mainstream authors, it might well seem awkward to imagine the completion of the feminist project and the emergence of New Women (and New Men!) when trying to represent a world where neither of these events has yet occurred. Conversely, for feminist authors, SF’s insistence on historical mutability and utopian possibility provides an ideal narrative vehicle through which to posit and explore the always necessary and political question, “what comes after patriarchy?” <cite id="note_7" class="note">In essence, then, SF is a powerful tool that enables authors of all political persuasions to theorize about both science and society in powerful ways. For further discussion, see Carl Freedman’s <span class="booktitle">Critical Theory and Science Fiction</span>.</cite></p>
<p>And indeed, feminist SF authors offer a surprising array of answers to this question. One of the first and most powerful glimpses of postpatriarchy comes at the very end of Joanna Russ’ science fiction classic <span class="booktitle">The Female Man</span> (1975). Russ’ novel follows the adventures of four women who are all variants on the same genotype living on parallel Earths as they prepare for a cataclysmic event that threatens them all: a final, literal Battle of the Sexes. Joanna, the character who inhabits an Earth much like our own, decides that she can best contribute to the war effort as an author. In a highly self-reflexive move, she then writes a book about four variants on the same genotype preparing for a multiverse Battle of the Sexes that she calls - of course - <span class="booktitle">The Female Man</span>. As Joanna sends her book into the world, she imagines what its fate might be if women win the forthcoming war:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Wash your face and take your place without fuss in the Library of Congress, for all books end up there eventually, both little and big…. Do not get glum when you are no longer understood, little book. Do not curse your fate. Do not reach up from readers’ laps and punch the readers’ noses.<br /> Rejoice, little book!<br /> For on that day, we will be free. (<span class="booktitle">Female Man</span> 213-14)</p>
<p>For both Joanna the character and Joanna Russ the author, a truly postfeminist, postpatriarchal world is one where women will no longer be superheroes or victims (as they so often are in <span class="booktitle">The Female Man</span> itself); instead, it is a world where gender inequity - and stories about it - will simply no longer make sense.</p>
<p>This is not to say that SF authors imagine postpatriarchal worlds as sterile, static places stripped of human desire, but as spaces where the relations between sex, gender, and desire are organized along radically different lines. For instance, as one of the narrators in Samul R. Delany’s <span class="booktitle">Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand</span> (1984) explains:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">In Arachnia as it is spoken on Nepiy, “she” is the pronoun for all sentient individuals of whatever species who have achieved the legal status of “woman.” The ancient, dimorphic form “he,” once used exclusively for the genderal indication of males…for more than a hundred-twenty years now, has been reserved for the general sexual object of “she,” during the period of excitation, regardless of the gender of the woman speaking or the gender of the woman referred to. (78)</p>
<p>Here, Delany articulates insights about the multiplicity of sexed and gendered subjectivities and the mobility of sexual desire much like those offered by theoretical and literary postfeminists. In doing so, he vividly demonstrates how gender may be constituted differently across time and space. Additionally, he suggests that even within a given culture gender may be highly flexible, emerging as it does at the interface of social custom and personal desire.</p>
<p>Although the postfeminist, postpatriarchal worlds of SF are almost always characterized by this kind of gender playfulness and sexual exuberance, they are hardly free of strife. Indeed, the notion of difference within a continuum of sex and gender has become even more central to the current generation of SF authors. For example, Nicola Griffith’s <span class="booktitle">Ammonite</span> (1992) invokes the century-long feminist tradition of imagining an alternate world where all the men have been killed by some natural disaster, thus freeing the women to build a harmonious new society. <cite id="note_8" class="note">This tradition is generally thought to begin with Mary E. Bradley Lane’s <span class="booktitle">Mizora: A Prophecy</span> (1881) and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s <span class="booktitle">Herland</span> (1915). More recent examples include Joanna Russ’ “When It Changed” (1972) and <span class="booktitle">The Female Man</span> (1975) and Marge Piercy’s <span class="booktitle">He, She, and It</span> (1991). For further discussion of women’s utopian writing, see especially Carol Farley Kessler’s <span class="booktitle">Daring to Dream: Utopian Fiction by United States Women before 1950</span> and Jane L. Donawerth and Carol Kolmerton’s <span class="booktitle">Utopian and Science Fiction by Women: Worlds of Difference</span>.</cite> Griffith, however, departs from this tradition by depicting the women of her world as deeply enmeshed in complex relations - to themselves and others, to offworld corporations and planet-bound tribes, to families and romantic partners - that continually threaten the survival of all. As one offworlder explains to her corporate peers: “I know these people. Or what they’ve become. They don’t think the way we do - they never did…. Their way of life is dying. They know that. But what they can’t conceive of is that it’s possible to live another way…. It’s almost impossible to understand” (319). And indeed, although some of these women do come to tentative understandings with one another by the end of <span class="booktitle">Ammonite</span>, many others are left out of these new alliances - and the fate of the planet as a whole is still shrouded in mystery. Here, then, Griffith explores both “what we might become” in a postpatriarchal world and, concurrently, the “new problems and restrictions” that might arise when older ones are banished.</p>
<p>In conclusion, postfeminism encompasses a diverse range of attitudes toward the second-wave variants of feminism that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. For the most part, conservative and progressive writers alike have used it to think about what comes after those feminist practices that secured important rights for women in the past but that no longer seem to address the complexities of women’s lives in a technology-intensive era of global capitalism. Additionally, postfeminism can be used to describe the creative output of feminist SF authors who explore the radical, politically charged question of what might come after patriarchy itself. With the increasing popularity of the phrase “third-wave feminism” as a descriptor for contemporary women’s progressive politics, however, it seems that postfeminism is rapidly becoming a term whose time has past. Thus we might think of it as one type of third-wave feminism or even as a way to describe a certain strain of theoretical and literary writing that emerged during the transition from second- to third-wave feminism.</p>
<p>Personally, I welcome this change in terminology. As even the most cursory Google search indicates, feminism is alive and well, especially amongst the young women (and even amongst some of the young men) who populate our classrooms and read our books. In contrast to many of those artists and scholars who have identified themselves as postfeminists, this new generation of media-savvy women and men were born long after the rise and fall of second-wave feminism. As such, they evince almost no nostalgia for the mythic dream of a lost sisterhood that seems to permeate much postfeminist writing, nor are they duped by conservative claims about the completion of the feminist project and the return to gender relations as usual. They are, however, remarkably curious about the past, present, and future of feminism. And I, for one, look forward to teaching it to them. After all, it’s like the sticker says: there will be plenty of time to be postfeminists once we all live in a postpatriarchy.</p>
<h2>Works Cited</h2>
<p>Balsamo, Anne. “Feminism for the Incurably Informed.” <span class="journaltitle">South Atlantic Quarterly</span> 92.4 (1993): 681-711.</p>
<p>Baumgardner, Jennifer and Amy Richards. <span class="booktitle">Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future</span>. New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2002.</p>
<p>Comstock, Michelle. “Grrrl Zine Networks: Re-Composing Spaces of Authority, Gender, and Culture.” <span class="booktitle">Journal of Advanced Composition</span> 21.2 (2001): 383-409.</p>
<p>Davis, Diane Mowery. “”Breaking Up’ (at) Phallocracy: Post-Feminism’s Chortling Hammer.” <span class="journaltitle">Rhetoric Review</span> 14.1 (1995): 126-141.</p>
<p>Delany, Samuel R. <span class="booktitle">Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand</span>. New York: Bantam Books, 1984.</p>
<p>Doane, Janice. “Undoing Feminism: From the Preoedipal to Postfeminism in Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles.” <span class="journaltitle">American Literary History</span> 2.3 (1990): 422-42.</p>
<p>Donawerth, Jane L. and Carol Kolmerton, eds. <span class="booktitle">Utopian and Science Fiction by Women: Worlds of Difference</span>. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1984.</p>
<p>Freedman, Carl. <span class="booktitle">Critical Theory and Science Fiction</span>. Hanover, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2000.</p>
<p>Griffith, Nicola. <span class="booktitle">Ammonite</span>. New York: Del Ray, 1992.</p>
<p>Hansen, Elaine Tuttle. “Fiction and (Post) Feminism in Atwood’s Bodily Harm.” <span class="booktitle">Novel</span> 19.1 (1985): 5-21.</p>
<p>Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” <span class="booktitle">Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature</span>. New York: Routledge, 1991. 149-182.</p>
<p>Jones, Paul Christian. “A Re-Awakening: Anne Tyler’s Postfeminist Edna Pointellier in <span class="booktitle">Ladder of Years</span>.” <span class="journaltitle">Critique</span> 44.3 (Spring 2003): 271-83.</p>
<p>Joyce, Lisa. <a href="/writingpostfeminism/postfeminism" class="internal">Writing Postfeminism</a>. 1996. ebr: writing (post) feminism. Ed. Lisa Joyce and Gay Lynn Crossley. <a href="http://www.electronicbookreview.com">www.electronicbookreview.com</a>. Downloaded May 20, 2004.</p>
<p>Kavka, Misha. “Feminism, Ethics, and History, or What Is the “Post” in Postfeminism?” <span class="booktitle">Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature</span> 21.1 (2002): 29-44.</p>
<p>Kessler, Carol Farley, ed. <span class="booktitle">Daring to Dream: Utopian Fiction by United States Women before 1950</span>. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1994.</p>
<p>Koenen, Ann. “The (Black) Lady Vanishes: Postfeminism, Poststructuralism, and Theorizing in Narratives by Black Women.” <span class="booktitle">Explorations on Post-Theory: Toward a Third Space</span>. Ed. Fernando de Toro. Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert Verlag, 1999. 131-43.</p>
<p>Lotz, Amanda D. “Postfeminist Television Criticism: Rehabilitating Critical Terms and Identifying Postfeminist Attributes.” <span class="booktitle">Feminist Media Studies</span> 1.1 (2001): 105-21.</p>
<p>Mandle, Bette. “Feminism, Postfeminism, and <span class="booktitle">The Heidi Chronicles</span>.” <span class="journaltitle">Studies in the Humanities</span> 17.2 (1990): 120-28.</p>
<p>Marchessault, Janine and Kim Sawchuk, eds. <span class="booktitle">Wild Science: Reading Feminism, Medicine and the Media</span>. London and New York: Routledge, 2000.</p>
<p>Mazza, Cris. “Editing Postfeminist Fiction: Finding the Chic in Lit.” <span class="journaltitle">symploke</span> 8.1-2 (2000): 101-112.</p>
<p>McLean, Anne. “Notes for a Post-feminist Poetry.” <span class="booktitle">The Insecurity of Art</span>. Ed. Ken Norris and Peter Van Toorn. Montreal: Vehicule Press, 1982. 94-96.</p>
<p>Modleski, Tania. <span class="booktitle">Feminism without Women: Culture and Criticism in a “Postfeminist” Age</span>. New York: Routledge, 1991.</p>
<p>Moseley, Rachel, and Jacinda Read. “Having it Ally: Popular Television (Post-)Feminism. <span class="journaltitle">Feminist Media Studies</span> 2.2 (2002): 231-49.</p>
<p>Press, Andrea, and Terry Strathman. “Work, Family, and Social Class in Television Images of Women: Prime-Time Television and the Construction of Postfeminism.” <span class="journaltitle">Women and Language</span> 16.2 (1993): 7-15.</p>
<p>Probyn, Elspeth. “New Traditionalism and Post-Feminism: TV Does the Home.” <span class="journaltitle">Screen</span> 31.2 (1990): 147-59.</p>
<p>Robinson, Lillian S. “Killing Patriarchy: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the Murder Mystery, and Post-Feminist Propaganda.” <span class="journaltitle">Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature</span> 10.2 (1991): 273-85.</p>
<p>Russ, Joanna. <span class="booktitle">The Female Man</span>. (1975) Boston: Beacon, 1986.</p>
<p>Russo, Mary. “Notes on “Post-Feminism.’” <span class="booktitle">The Politics of Theory: Proceedings of the Essex Conference on the Sociology of Literature</span>. Ed. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, Margaret Iverson, and Diana Loxley. Colchester: University of Essex Press, 1983. 27-37.</p>
<p>Samuelian, Kristin Flieger. “Piracy is Our Only Option: Postfeminist Intervention in <span class="booktitle">Sense and Sensibility</span>.” <span class="journaltitle">Topic</span> 48 (1997): 39-48.</p>
<p>Sargent, Pamela. “Introduction: Women and Science Fiction.” <span class="booktitle">Women of Wonder: Science Fiction Stories by Women about Women</span>. New York: Vintage Books, 1975. viii-lxiv.</p>
<p>Sinclair, Carla. <span class="booktitle">Netchick: A Smart-Girl Guide to the Wired World</span>. New York: Henry Holt, 1996.</p>
<h2>Notes</h2>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/lisa-yaszek">Lisa Yaszek</a>, <a href="/tags/yaszek">yaszek</a>, <a href="/tags/elisabeth-joyce">elisabeth joyce</a>, <a href="/tags/postfemin">postfemin</a>, <a href="/tags/new-traditionalism">New Traditionalism</a>, <a href="/tags/science-fiction">science fiction</a>, <a href="/tags/maria-antoinetta-macciocchi">Maria-Antoinetta Macciocchi</a>, <a href="/tags/julia-kristeva">julia kristeva</a>, <a href="/tags/theory">theory</a>, <a href="/tags/toril-moi">toril moi</a>, <a href="/tags/lillian-robinson">Lillian Robinson</a>, <a href="/tags/susan-faludi">Susan Faludi</a>, <a href="/tags/probyn">Probyn</a>, <a href="/tags/rachel-moseley">Rachel Moseley</a>, <a href="/tags/jacinda-read">Jacinda Read</a>, <a href="/tags/amanda-lotz">Amanda Lotz</a>, <a href="/tags/judith-butler">judith butler</a>, <a href="/tags/anne-fa">Anne Fa</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator1072 at http://electronicbookreview.comhttp://electronicbookreview.com/thread/writingpostfeminism/%28fem%29sci-fi#commentsJoseph McElroy's Cyborg Plushttp://electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/seeing
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Salvatore Proietti</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2004-08-18</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><h2>1. All around <span class="booktitle">Plus</span></h2>
<p>What do we gain in looking at Joseph McElroy’s <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> as, among other things, a science-fiction novel? <cite id="note_1">Along with the experience of translating <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> and the essay ” <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> Light” into Italian, I recently had two chances in Rome to talk about McElroy, a doctoral seminar on Beckett and a conference on Emerson. I acknowledge my gratitude to the organizers, Professors Agostino Lombardo, Giorgio Mariani, and Igina Tattoni, as well as to Daniela Daniele who first alerted me about this project.</cite> In science fiction, a literalized metaphor is extended and made to become the narrative center of a possible, estranged world, as theorists have argued (cf. Suvin). My reading of <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> focuses on the presence of the icon of the compound entity, organic and technological at the same time, which science and science fiction have called the “cyborg.” Throughout its history, this metaphor has been put to manifold uses: agent of unrestrained power and authority, form of absolute subjection and dispossession, attempt at hopeful interaction between humans and technology.</p>
<p>Despite long and sustained attention from critics, science fiction appears not to have made it into respectability, and cautious caveats continue to accompany many readers’ responses when facing texts and authors deemed worthy of critical praise. In the specific case of <span class="booktitle">Plus</span>, critics have both argued and denied its generic status (respectively, cf. LeClair’s introduction to the 1987 edition [v], and Hadas), and only in the 1990s did references to the cyborg begin to appear (Tabbi 145). In general, analyzing such a struggle for legitimacy would lead a long way into both aesthetic and institutional issues, in which old-fashioned standards of timelessness are still applied by commentators who regard with suspicion the use of metaphors whose “technological” or “scientific” signifiers (whether coming from “hard” or “soft” sciences) are hopelessly bound to historical contingency, haunted by the specter of a readership not necessarily coinciding with the “distinction” of canonicity. With regard to McElroy, the “disproportion between accomplishment and recognition” pointed out by Tom LeClair (ibid.) might precisely stem from an emphasis on science unparalleled among contemporary Anglophone novelists.</p>
<p>For our purposes, it might suffice to say that <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> is, among other things, the best science-fiction novel written in the 1970s by a non-specialized writer. Formally speaking, its focus on the standpoint of the cyborg, providing an inside view of the consciousness of the (semi-)artificial intelligence, brings <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> closer to a genre novel such as Pat Cadigan’s 1993 <span class="booktitle">Fools</span> (another novel about a search for memories) rather than to a highbrow take such as Richard Powers’ <span class="booktitle">Galatea 2.2</span>: if the latter is a novel about the confrontation with the posthuman, McElroy and Cadigan’s protagonists try to enact what <span class="lightEmphasis">being</span> posthuman might be like.</p>
<p>Among McElroy’s works, the presence of science-fictional motifs also haunts <span class="booktitle">Women and Men</span>. And in going through the essays reprinted in his recent Italian collection, <span class="booktitle">Exponential</span>, one finds many references to science-fiction writers and works: from precursors such as Samuel Butler (16) and Jules Verne (38); to contemporary genre classics such as Arthur C. Clarke’s <span class="booktitle">2001: A Space Odyssey</span> (32-4, 37), J. G. Ballard (47, 55, 64, 76), and Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s <span class="booktitle">The Sirens of Titan</span>, in conjunction with mentions of William Burroughs and cyberpunk (75); to non-specialized examples such as Richard Powers (78), John Barth’s <span class="booktitle">Giles Goat-Boy</span> (34, 54, 76), William Hjortsberg’s cyborg novel <span class="booktitle">Gray Matters</span> (58), and Italo Calvino’s <span class="booktitle">Cosmicomics</span> cycle, along with a story from that cycle’s immediate model in Italian literature, Primo Levi’s collection <span class="booktitle">The Periodic Table</span> (69-70). <span class="booktitle">Exponential</span> also contains reviews of Calvino’s <span class="booktitle">Invisible Cities</span> (115-9) and Samuel Beckett’s <span class="booktitle">The Lost Ones</span> (125-9), both at least marginally science-fictional texts. To these I would add the mentions of Doris Lessing’s <span class="booktitle">The Four-Gated City</span> and, again, of Calvino in LeClair and McCaffery’s interview (238, 244) - different facets in a consistent tradition of literature exploring the territories of science.</p>
<p>The metaphor of the cyborg has a very long history in 20th century science and science fiction, which here can only be hinted at. <cite id="note_2">I tried to examine this history in my unpublished PhD dissertation. For some probings into cyberpunk discourse, cf. my “Jeremiad” and “Bodies.”</cite> Heads or minds separated from bodies: an age-old dream, or nightmare, with intertextual resonances emerging so strongly that isolating dominant texts and filiations is virtually impossible. Much is at stake in this metaphor and in all discourses evoking it, with fiction and nonfiction creating two parallel histories with mutually communicating rhetorics. Since the beginning in the 1920s, in the speculations of scientists such as J. D. Bernal and J. B. S. Haldane, personal body, body politic, and space have been interacting. In Bernal’s <span class="booktitle">The World, the Flesh, and the Devil</span> (1929), the “colonization of space and the mechanization of the body are obviously complementary” (73): cosmic policing and prosthetic technology will free the human mind from all material fetters and ensure its undying control over the universe. Individual self-sufficiency and will to expansiveness are the collective ideals incarnated in a view of the body such as that of Alexis Carrel, Nobel-prize winning pioneer of transplant technology, who sees in his popular <span class="booktitle">Man, the Unknown</span> (1935) skin and body surfaces as “the almost perfect fortified frontier of a closed world” (65).</p>
<p>And since the 1930s, U.S. pulp authors powerfully include semi-artificial humans and brains encased in boxes in the repertoire of their imagery, often drawing on Darwinian and eugenic myths: tales on transparent eyeballs being nothing and seeing all, dominating space and other people, parables on technoscientific hubris, in different degrees of tension between empowerment and socialization.</p>
<p>Officially, the birth of the cyborg takes place in 1960 at a conference held at Brooks Air Force Base, Texas, in a paper delivered by physicians Nathan S. Kline and Manfred Clynes, entitled “Drugs, Space, and Cybernetics: Evolution to Cyborgs.” In their view, the cyborg prefigures the advent and triumph of “participant evolution”: (military) science and technology are about to make possible the planning and designing of infinite variants of <span class="lightEmphasis">homo sapiens</span>, able to live long and prosper in the worlds of space exploration. This new entity “deliberately incorporates exogenous components extending the self-regulatory control function of the organism in order to adapt it to new environments.” Body processes and the attendant “robot-like problems are taken care of automatically and unconsciously, thus freeing man to explore, to create, to think, and to feel” (347-8). Their epic narrative of mastery over the universe, while ostensibly foregrounding a pluralism of embodiments, posits not only a mechanistic view of the body, but also a faith and hope in its irrelevance and coming supersession: the self-regulating, homeostatic balance along the boundary of the interface between organic and inorganic components renders the cyborg less an empowered body than an armored mind. The body mechanic is the body obsolete, a pure thinking apparatus, who has broken free of the devilish materiality of world and flesh: a literal self-made man, capable of “adapting his body to whatever milieu he chooses (345).</p>
<p>With its Protean self-making act and its asocial expansive thrust, the cyborg is ready to connect into the mainstream of U.S. national mythology. Following in the steps of early cyberneticians such as Norbert Wiener and Vannevar Bush, Kline and Clynes also present their creation as conqueror of a “New Frontier” (347). In this vein, before cyberpunk made science fiction part of the postmodernist narrative, two decades crowded with theory, fiction, and popularization had established a rhetoric centered on the drive toward the limitless frontiers of scientific imagination. This rhetoric, turning ostensible symbiosis and coupling into (self)instrumentalization, was - and to a great extent still is - divided between celebrations of omnipotence soon to come and specular humanistic recoils from reification, but united in saluting the cyborg, either with enthusiasm or with dismay, as a new beginning for the American self (cderf. Martin), launched toward definitive abandonment of the body and of history: Leo Marx’s technological sublime as a dream come true for the individual and as an analogue for the nation (cf. Wilson).</p>
<p>As studies such as Mark Dery’s <span class="booktitle">Escape Velocity</span> and N. Katherine Hayles’ <span class="booktitle">How We Became Posthuman</span> show, at the core of much theorizing about the posthuman still lie those same dreams - informed with a technological determinism which figures such as Marshall McLuhan and Alvin Toffler have updated and popularized for the contemporary age. From the science-fiction field the responses to this finalistic narrative have been more nuanced, exploring the cyborg identity in detail, with a keener awareness that both personal bodies and the body politic are made of very resistant materials, all of which (including ethics and language) must be considered on their own terms. The very root of the genre, inherent to the idea that science and technology can become usable tools for literature, is a deep faith in metaphor, in the hope that possible worlds can be created in the reader’s mind capable of providing estranged versions of its own world. As Darko Suvin writes, these fictions are complex parables, not mechanic allegories (“homologies,” as McElroy describes his attempt in <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> in many of his essays: cf. ” <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> Light” and <span class="booktitle">Exponential</span> 81): linguistic creations, but nevertheless narratively solid and reconstructible, always meant to achieve an inner consistency. In this, science fiction has always proposed a challenge that appears to escape the dichotomy between ontology and epistemology, between world and interpretation: the science-fictional worlds have at their center an “absent paradigm” (Angenot) just as Faulkner’s have at their center a “climactic ellipsis” (Materassi) <cite id="note_3">Both these notions (ironically resonating, I realize as I write, with the matter at hand), in different ways, might also be pertinent to the themes of McElroy’s The Letter Left to Me, a novel of endurance in the face of loss whose Beckettian undertones are no less strong than those of <span class="booktitle">Plus</span>.</cite> : the interpretive quest of the reader, ultimately, consists in recostructing the world the narration itself is an emanation of. Therefore, I would maintain that the relevance of <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> lies in its taking its central metaphor seriously and in its own terms. <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> goes much further and deeper than texts that “simply” (quotation marks are due, of course, in order not to unduly belittle achievements such as Powers’ <span class="booktitle">Galatea 2.2</span> or Barth’s <span class="booktitle">Giles Goat-Boy</span>) explore it for its impact on an observer who is participant but ultimately safely on the outside of the boundary between science and the body. Thus, I would argue that one tenor of McElroy’s multiplex parable is the assertion that such a somewhat nostalgic intellectual figure still belonging to a separate sphere is no longer conceivable. McElroy’s cyborg’s tale “told from within” is an example of pure science fiction, of what science fiction should be, of what all important science fiction manages to be.</p>
<h2>2. In Touch with Imp Plus</h2>
<p>In the critical mainstream surrounding <span class="booktitle">Plus</span>, many have read the novel as an example of a “world elsewhere” created by an empowered self (cf. Brooke-Rose; LeClair, Art 144-6; Miller), a Cartesian subject dominating a literally mechanized <span class="lightEmphasis">res extensa</span>. In such analyses, cybernetics provides a template for self-sustaining aesthetic autonomy (cf. Porush, <span class="booktitle">Fiction</span>). Rather, I would read <span class="booktitle">Plus</span>, the interior monologue of the brain of a dying scientist implanted into an orbiting satellite, as an early metafictional, intertextual critique of the rhetoric of absolute, empowering openness, and of transcendence through disembodiment.</p>
<p>My analysis will follow, in the progress of Imp Plus’ linguistic and cognitive self-awareness, the tension between openness and closure, between expansion (or retreat?) into an undifferentiated void and the (re)discovery and inescapable necessity of coming to terms with its own new bodily being, with the world and with otherness. I will read its final act as the double rejection of both the myth of the instrumental body and of the myth of unfettered expansiveness - that is, of the most widespread ideological assumptions underlying the rhetoric of human-technological interfaces (either in the years preceding the publication of <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> or in much current “cyberculture”).</p>
<p>As the novel starts, the explanted brain is indeed a literalization of Emerson’s classic transparent eyeball scenario: a <span class="lightEmphasis">tabula rasa</span> hooked into an “Interplanetary Monitoring Platform” experimenting on solar energy storing devices, perceiving himself against the background of a surrounding void. But in the very act of self-perception - an act of feeling, an act of imagining - Emerson’s <span class="booktitle">Nature</span> is powerfully revised:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">He found it all around. It opened and was close. He felt it was itself, but felt it was more.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">It nipped open from outside in and from inside out. Imp Plus found it all around, and this was not the start. (3)</p>
<p>For Imp Plus, this feeling of openness and openendedness brings about the awareness of a previous existence. The emergence of his own self is never privileged as a creation <span class="lightEmphasis">ex nihilo</span>, and involves a two-way traffic, a true interaction between subject and world. Imp Plus’ acquisition of language also starts from scraps of past and present experiences and not from scratch. Consistent with this, language and vision (being and understanding, ontology and epistemology, self-scrutiny and outward observation) are facets of the same drive: ” <span class="lightEmphasis">see</span> was the need or effect of <span class="lightEmphasis">say</span> ” (143). As in Emerson’s <span class="booktitle">Divinity School Address</span>, here too “always the seer is the sayer. Somehow his dream is told…clearest and most permanent in words” (78). Imp Plus’ first metalinguistic remark is about sight: “Socket was a word” (3). In learning how to see himself, he learns how to say himself. This is the experience he describes, over and over, as “lifting,” as he acquires (at once acquiring again and acquiring anew) the language with which to express his condition, and to communicate it to others. What he perceives and communicates, though - and this is definitely unlike Emerson - is the birth of a body. The attempt of overcoming dispossession and instrumentalization can only be predicated on physical existence; his first attempts at articulate communications will be about the development of his new perceptual system, centering on the imagery of growth - a growth involving a process of cellular fusion and differentiation of unheard-of proportions, and allowing a new consciousness, capable of acting beyond originally programmed routine operations, to emerge together with the new body.</p>
<p>From the very first page of <span class="booktitle">Plus</span>, memories start coming in, sketches from a fragmented mind trickling in recurring associations, scenes, as well as isolated words and phrases. And what makes this protagonist unforgettably moving is his unceasing quest for love among the ruins of a past which does not even yield his “human” name: moments back on Earth, ill and dying, with wife and daughter; moments with a “woman at the California sea,” and with another one met shortly before the final operation of brain excision, “by the Mexican fire” (109), which also triggers images of birds and the sun. In the past and in the present, in emotions and body, the sun resonates as a salvific force, just like the repeated reminiscence about the encounter with the blind, bandaged “news vendor,” who manages to compensate for his sightlessness and keeps trying to perceive the world. Most disturbing are the conversations with the “Acrid Voice,” who tells him that the eventual orbital decay of the satellite might somehow be controlled (perhaps with the brain’s own help), so that he might be recovered, but who left too many doubts to be fully believable.</p>
<p>In the following chapters the disordered accumulation of memories slowly and progressively coalesces into semantic clusters of highly specialized languages associated with biology, alternating and coexisting with an initially minimal vocabulary, articulated through an incremental process of linguistic redundancy and overload (cf. LeClair “McElroy”), of repetition with variants:</p>
<p>Imp Plus caved out. There was a lifting all around, and Imp Plus knew there was no skull. But there had been another lifting and he had wanted it, but then that lifting had not been good. He did not want to go back to it. He did not know if that lifting had been bad. But this new lifting was good. (3)</p>
<p>If Imp Plus is a cyborg, it is one very much like that of Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto,” among many other reasons because in <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> there is no nostalgia for any idealized past experience: Imp Plus’ past as an integral human is one source of his present state as an integrated cyborg, not the goal or hope of a fullness he strives for. As the new identity develops, the organic and the inorganic are bound to interact, without according either component any superior or inferior status. And this past has no intrinsic ethical connotations, is the site of both positive and negative present sensations.</p>
<p>In the above quoted third paragraph, ethics is introduced in the shape of ambiguity: there are, within Imp Plus’ words, a number of types and meanings of “lifting,” and the option between good and bad shows up as inescapable, if not always with a clear-cut value judgment following it: the lifting of the brain from the body (from “the skull”), the launch into space, the activation of the new system of (self-)perception. And somewhere in the background, an echo from that solitary “head” in Emerson’s <span class="booktitle">Nature</span>, “uplifted into infinite space”, intent on being “nothing” and “see[ing] all,” throwing at the self and at others a literal and imaginative imperative: “Build…your own world” (Emerson 6, 46). Here, though, there is no lifted mind prior to the world-building striving: the entire novel, indeed, portrays the mutual construction of a subject and its surroundings. Linking both is the former’s will to existence, a choice and a longing which for the semiartificial being is no less (perhaps, more), as it were, heartfelt than it would be for an ordinary human.</p>
<p>The only automatism in Imp Plus’ action is his choosing to perceive its own self, rejecting the position of mere “monitor,” receptor or reflector, passively intent on perceiving the outside. In doing so, he refuses the master narrative of the cyborg as instrumental body (upheld by cyberneticians and other rhapsodes of the posthuman), which means for him being <span class="lightEmphasis">somebody else’s</span> instrument, and instead embraces another longing, which sees the technologizing of the body as the possible catalyst for a new fulfilling relation between subject and object. There is a contest for autonomy going on inside the cyborg body, but it is a contest in which there is no direct relation between component and axiology: organic vs. inorganic are not equated to whole vs. reified (as in classic liberal attitudes) or to obsolete vs. futuristic (as in teleologic-posthumanist speculations). Both elements can be the site of such a contest, and their inevitable interaction can bring about further complication; as Haraway writes, “the relation between organism and machine has been a border war [involving] <span class="lightEmphasis">pleasure</span> in the construction of boundaries and… <span class="lightEmphasis">responsibility</span> in their construction” (150).</p>
<p>Many are the boundaries crossed by McElroy’s cyborg self. Fragmented as he is, Imp Plus (the “more,” the “Plus” supplementing the “he” with the “it” - after all, “Imp Plus” = “I am “Plus,” as noted by LeClair [“McElroy” 35]) will become a multiply inclusive being, holding together two <span class="lightEmphasis">kinds</span> of components, not just two items: organic elements include the brain and the nutrients he is inserted in (vegetables and glucose are mentioned), connected with several computer and measuring systems. In this way, the “cognitive estrangement” (Suvin) of this science-fictional situation presents the reader with a surprising, hopeful possibility of heterogeneous wholeness; as McElroy said in his interview with LeClair and McCaffery, “I also saw in <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> the good old theme of reintegrating the body and the soul, a dynamic drama of growth, unexpected growth” (239). And, as he commented in ” <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> Light,” about the reformulation of personal autonomy in the age of technology: “In <span class="booktitle">Plus</span>, in Imp Plus, you have something in between instrument and person. In the beginning you do.”</p>
<p>In this complicated drama of desire and frustration, all the verbal games redefine but never erase the presence of a consciousness. Whereas the reader might be baffled by the juxtaposition of indirect and free indirect discourse, in the novel most glaring for his listeners on Earth is the confusion within Imp Plus’ communication between the speech of his operative functions and the speech of self-reflection, which leads him to evoke the “shadows” of his memories in one of his dialogues with Ground Control: “The answer was that Imp Plus was able to think in transmission” (11). Bakhtinian and not Chomskyan, he has the ability to think dialogically; his self-perception is connected to communication with others. And he learns how to lie.</p>
<p>If Imp Plus opens his self-expression by talking about an opening, as he begins to gain some degree of self-awareness, the awareness of a distinction between self and world, between the <span class="lightEmphasis">he</span> and the <span class="lightEmphasis">it</span> of his first sentence, brings about a degree of closure. As in frontier discourse the advance of the settlement can only be the cause of a receding of the open territory, in <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> pleasure can only be shaped by the needs and responsibilities of selfhood:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Everywhere he went there was a part just missing. A particle of difference. And in its place an inclination, a sharp drop.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">And through this Imp Plus thought: or was suddenly looking back at having thought: that those particles that were just missing were driven away by the aim of his looking: and that his sight was the Sun’s force turned back into light in him by means of an advanced beam. He had many aims. He?… The Sun in Imp Plus was one eye; and if so what might be two? It was the chance of something.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">What came to Imp Plus amid the brightness was that some of him was left.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">So some of the gradients were Imp Plus.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Which was why he could fall into himself. (6)</p>
<p>Imp Plus’ outward drive, almost immediately, encounters the limitations of identity, even as he strives toward other purposes (“aims”) than those imposed upon him by the controlling agencies from Earth, and finds among the signals another sight worth detecting (that is, himself). As the potential becomes actual, as that “chance” becomes the possibility of “something” specific, his vocabulary translates all this into images of a downhill course: a Fall for the cyborg.</p>
<p>At the end of Chapter 2, already “the more that was all around was getting closer and closer to Imp Plus” (22): as he builds himself, he also builds a boundary <span class="lightEmphasis">around</span> his self, meeting constriction while at the same time looking for freedom. In this condition, the cybernetic feedback of a character bootstrapping himself into selfhood can only appear as suffering, as the loss of a Beckettian sort of pre-Oedipal bliss: “He had nothing to stand on; the bulge he was on was himself. The bulge was on the brink of the cleft, the cleft was in a fold, the fold was more open, and when it was all open it would not be a fold. He could not help wanting this, but with each unfolding a fold was gone” (98).</p>
<p>As flashes and associations keep bringing back his past existence, body and human connections become a pervasive “absence” (136), “emptiness” (195), “vacancy” (196), which must be compared with the present situation: “Words remembering other words, but new words for what he had become” (142). At the threshold between past embodiment and present disembodiment, Imp Plus imagines himself as a personified “fence” (151, 159), imposing limits upon what could only have been a source of perfect fulfillment as an unfulfilled promise of boundless openness to be contemplated from the edge. As Imp Plus’ memory progresses - as his contacts with Ground Control continue - past connections appear more and more vivid and more and more distant, in “an emptiness of reciprocal failure to be remembered between them in which they began to share if not know what was escaping each other’s thought” (212).</p>
<p>Words are also presences surrounding him and linking him with Earth: Ground Control, Travel Light (Travelling on Light, Operation TL), Cap Com, the Good Voice and the Acrid Voice, and the Dim Echo, which is both outside Imp Plus’ new being and a part of him, wholly subordinate to the Ground agencies - ironically, the closest thing to an “original” self he can claim (and whom he can access far less easily than Ground). For Imp Plus and for the reader of his story, the ghostly presence he calls the Dim Echo is an ominous, cold reminder that the semi-artificial being might be more human (more humane) than the remnants of his flesh-and-blood human counterpart. Keeping them all together, keeping together what he describes as a “great lattice,” within and around himself, the light: a connection which is immaterial, but emotionally and physically real.</p>
<p>Sensations and emotions are the part of the past he is still reaching out for:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Imp Plus wanted to find the foot he had put in the yellow leather shoe; to find the voice in which he had told the blind news vendor in that cold place in another sea, “That’s my daughter,” as she ran down the pavement to meet the dark-haired woman. He wanted to find…the eyes to see spilt blood, spilt smells, the point of jokes, things not so beautiful as what had come to him through growth… (204)</p>
<p>But one of his ties with the past is hardly conducive to hope: “the Acrid inferences would not let up” (ibid.), confirming that his fate lies in his present state; he can’t go home again: “He had to see his being only as it was now” (143).</p>
<p>And the way he is now is determined by those unknown forces who try to keep him under control, for unstated (given the origin of cyborg speculations, we have to ask, military?) purposes. Knowing, growing, search for origins, self-determination, all are mediated and shaped in the proud construction of language right at the moment in which deconstruction (or <span class="lightEmphasis">un</span> construction) appears triumphant. Self-diminishment, like Bartleby’s anorexia, could be a way of imposing one’s own vanishing self as a felt absence. And yet <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> is all about the recreation of a <span class="lightEmphasis">presence</span>: not (as in Ihab Hassan’s <span class="booktitle">The Dismemberment of Orpheus</span>) a literature of silence, but a literature <span class="lightEmphasis">out</span> of silence and speechlessness (in a confrontation with “Voices”): a will to remaking when the unmaking process is spreading everywhere.</p>
<p><span class="booktitle">Plus</span>, in other words, reinterprets its acknowledged sources, Samuel Beckett’s <span class="booktitle">The Lost Ones</span> and the history of Moon flights (especially Apollo 13) as parables of impossibility of control over personal and collective existence, and of endurance and defense of dignity in such a condition of isolation. Space might be a trap, but offers also a dream never to be discarded. And thinking of McElroy’s references to Calvino, we could probably add the <span class="booktitle">Cosmicomics’</span> protagonist, Qwfwq, as a source for McElroy’s fascination with weightlessness (a keyword in Calvino, of course) already pointed out by Tony Tanner (Scenes 207-37).</p>
<p>As in the previously quoted passage from Emerson, in both seeing and saying, Imp Plus as well is looking for some kind of permanence. So, the most Beckettian passages in <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> are its strongest affirmations of hope: “Imp Plus knew he had no eyes. Yet Imp Plus saw. Or persisted in seeing” (3). And later:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">He had no choice but to go on to understand what was going on. No choice he thought but to be centered and to see out from the brain hub, but then in from the body bonds; see meanwhile from the rounds of tendril bendings up out of cells near an open cleft to those message rounds pressed small in the bulb-bun of branchings at the rear of the brain, to (then) the fine turn of a limb tip finding a nearby limb to join or a bulkhead shine to brush. He thought in the pieces - he did not know how except that the pieces whether refracting in toward a center he hardly had any more or aiming each its own moves separate along a many-sided tissue of inclination were him. So Imp Plus tried to take heed, tried to think - what was it? (118)</p>
<p>Centerless and multiplex, shapeless and manifold (in this, similar to many protagonists of contemporary U.S. fiction, as Tony Tanner argued in <span class="booktitle">City of Words</span>), his new identity thrills and scares Imp Plus at the same time:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Him.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">He found it on his mouth and in his breath. <span class="lightEmphasis">Him</span>. A thing in all of him. But now he wasn’t sure. He saw he’d felt this <span class="lightEmphasis">him</span> in the brain. But where was it now? In too many centers.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">And there was a shifting like the subtraction of a land mass so two or more seas that had been apart now slid together. What happened to this <span class="lightEmphasis">him</span>? (114)</p>
<p>The scary part is that any process bears the mark of inherent instability: any growth can become a decline: “He was not just increasing. He could become less” (132). After all, he will never be isolated by the rest of “humanity,” just as he has never been; the threat of the “Concentration Loop” will always accompany him: “Which meant Imp <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> would be in touch with Ground again” (155).</p>
<p>In the end he is forced to consider the alternatives, which he tries to sort out with his new powers (as McElroy writes in ” <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> Light,” Imp is “evidently neuro-connected to Ground Control, word-wired, linked electronically, pulse-translatable evidently into communicable sounds - thought-wired?”: a form of telepathy?):</p>
<p class="longQuotation">So he began to answer and to ask. And while the IMP twisted, tumbled, spun, and pushed into lesser orbits, Imp Plus talked to the familiar ovals of the Acrid Voice. And not knowing where to begin, he used old words the Acrid Voice used. Words sometimes that the Acrid Voice had been going to use. But more wonderful than this in all the words that passed was what they lacked. It was far more than the words were equal to.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Imp Plus felt it all around. If he did not wish to tell Ground that what had been at first a body grown like a starfish of mouthless hydra seemed now other than body, wish faded into inability which was in turn only a shadow thrown by his sense that he could preserve what the Sun hoped they might become. (184)</p>
<p>He can cooperate in order to be retrieved, he can run away toward deep space: but then, both these options would mean accepting the patterns of instrumentalization and asocial empowerment the Powers-That-Be hope to incarnate in the cyborg body, whereas Imp Plus wants and needs connection and, above all, communication: “He had to tell all the truth he knew” (201).</p>
<p>The final question from Ground, as he is about to enter the Earth atmosphere toward likely self-destruction, has obvious allegorical undertones: “DO YOU HAVE POWER? ” (214). His self may have been developing, but rather than “transcendence through power” and the “mastery…of the re-creative intellect” (Miller 175, 177), McElroy and his cyborg seem preoccupied with the uncertainty of an alienated interiority, and Imp Plus’ answer is “YES AND NO… <span class="lightEmphasis">No desire to carom into space, no desire for re-entry</span> ” (214-5).</p>
<p>In concomitantly refusing to act as pure instrument, and to accept the mythologies of individual expansiveness, McElroy’s cyborg satellite restores a role to embodiment. As Tabbi writes, the “body he desires, like any sublime object, is made all the more painfully real to Imp Plus by virtue of its unattainability” (143). The finale of Imp Plus’ story appears to be a heroic sacrifice in the quest for a fulfilling form of literally limited, yet non-alienated self.</p>
<p>Something very solid melts into air in this ending: this is a defeat. And yet, this defeated, powerless science-fictional being ironically incarnates a hope. In Daniele’s interview, McElroy talks about the need for moving away and beyond wholesale rejections of technology, so common among intellectuals, and provocatively evokes Thoreau in connection with <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> (100). And ” <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> Light” concludes by describing the novel as a science-fictional pastoral idyll. And indeed, skeptical as it is, <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> appears to have been literally an ironic novel about the construction of a garden in the middle of the machine. A postmodern novel about innocence.</p>
<h2>Works Cited</h2>
<p>Angenot, Marc. “The Absent Paradigm.” <span class="journaltitle">Science-Fiction Studies</span> 6 (1979): 9-19.</p>
<p>Bernal, J. D. <span class="booktitle">The World, the Flesh, and the Devil</span>. London: Kegan, 1929.</p>
<p>Brooke-Rose, Christine. <span class="booktitle">A Rhetoric of the Unreal</span>. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981.</p>
<p>Cadigan, Pat. <span class="booktitle">Fools</span>. New York: Bantam, 1993.</p>
<p>Carrel, Alexis. <span class="booktitle">Man, the Unknown</span>. New York: Harper, 1935.</p>
<p>Daniele, Daniela. “Joseph McElroy: Cervelli in orbita.” <span class="booktitle">Scrittori e finzioni d’America</span>. Ed. Daniela Daniele. Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2000. 97-102.</p>
<p>Dery, Mark. <span class="booktitle">Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century</span>. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1996.</p>
<p>Emerson, Ralph Waldo. <span class="booktitle">Selected Prose and Poetry</span>. Ed. Reginald L. Cook. New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1950.</p>
<p>Hadas, Pamela W. “Green Thoughts on Being in Charge: Discovering Joseph McElroy’s <span class="booktitle">Plus</span>.” <span class="journaltitle">Review of Contemporary Fiction</span> 10 (1990): 140-55.</p>
<p>Hassan, Ihab. <span class="booktitle">The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Towards a Postmodern Literature</span>. New York: Oxford UP, 1982.</p>
<p>Haraway, Donna J. <span class="booktitle">Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature</span>. New York: Routledge, 1991.</p>
<p>Hayles, N. Katherine. <span class="booktitle">How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics</span>. Chicago: U. of Chicago P, 1999.</p>
<p>Kline, Nathan S., and Manfred Clynes. “Drugs, Space, and Cybernetics: Evolution to Cyborgs.” <span class="booktitle">Psychophysiological Aspects of Space Flight</span>. Ed. Bernard E. Flaherty. New York: Columbia UP, 1961. 345-71.</p>
<p>LeClair, Tom. <span class="booktitle">The Art of Excess: Mastery in Contemporary American Fiction</span>. Urbana: U. of Illinois P, 1989.</p>
<p>–. Introduction. Joseph McElroy. <span class="booktitle">Plus</span>. New York: Carroll and Graf, 1987. v-x.</p>
<p>–. “Joseph McElroy and the Art of Excess.” <span class="journaltitle">Contemporary Literature</span> 21 (1980): 15-37.</p>
<p>– and Larry McCaffery. “Interview with Joseph McElroy.” <span class="booktitle">Anything Can Happen: Interviews with Contemporary American Novelists</span>. Ed. Tom LeClair and Larry McCaffery. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1983. 235-51.</p>
<p>Materassi, Mario. “The Model of Climactic Ellipsis, or, The Event as Mask.” <span class="booktitle">The Artist and His Masks: William Faulkner’s Metafiction</span>. Ed. Agostino Lombardo. Rome: Bulzoni, 1991. 193-9.</p>
<p>Martin, Terence. <span class="booktitle">Parables of Possibility: The American Need for Beginnings</span>. New York: Columbia UP, 1995.</p>
<p>McElroy, Joseph. <span class="booktitle">Exponential</span>. Trans. Mario Marchetti. Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2003.</p>
<p>–. <span class="booktitle">The Letter Left To Me</span>. New York: Carroll and Graf, 1990.</p>
<p>–. <span class="booktitle">Plus</span>. 1976. New York: Carroll and Graf, 1987.</p>
<p>–. ” <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> Light.” Unpublished. [Italian ed. ” <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> Light: Scienza e letteratura.” Trans. Salvatore Proietti. <span class="journaltitle">Lo Straniero</span> 30-31 (2002): 105-114.]</p>
<p>McHale, Brian. <span class="booktitle">Postmodernist Fiction</span>. New York: Methuen, 1987.</p>
<p>Miller, Alicia M. “Power and Perception in <span class="booktitle">Plus</span>.” <span class="journaltitle">Review of Contemporary Fiction</span> 10 (1990): 173-80.</p>
<p>Porush, David. <span class="booktitle">The Soft Machine: Cybernetic Fiction</span>. New York: Methuen, 1985.</p>
<p>Powers, Richard. <span class="booktitle">Galatea 2.2</span>. New York: Farrar, 1995.</p>
<p>Proietti, Salvatore. “Bodies, Ghosts, and Global Virtualities: On Gibson and English-Canadian Cyberculture.” <span class="booktitle">Il Canada e le culture della globalizzazione</span>. Ed. Alfredo Rizzardi and Giovanni Dotoli. Fasano, Italy: Schena, 2001. 479-94.</p>
<p>–. <span class="booktitle">The Cyborg, Cyberspace, and North American Science Fiction</span>. Ph.D. diss., McGill U, 1998.</p>
<p>–. “The Informatic Jeremiad: The Virtual Frontier and U.S. Cyberculture.” <span class="booktitle">Science Fiction: Critical Frontiers</span>. Ed. Karen Sayer and John Moore. London: Macmillan and New York: St.Martin’s P, 2000. 116-26.</p>
<p>Suvin, Darko. <span class="booktitle">Positions and Presuppositions in Science Fiction</span>. Kent, OH: Kent State UP, 1988.</p>
<p>Tabbi, Joseph. <span class="booktitle">Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk</span>. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1995.</p>
<p>Tanner, Tony. <span class="booktitle">City of Words</span>. London: Cape, 1971.</p>
<p>–. <span class="booktitle">Scenes of Nature, Signs of Man</span>. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987.</p>
<p>Wilson, Rob. “Techno-Euphoria and the Discourse of the American Sublime.” <span class="journaltitle">Boundary</span> 2 19 (1992): 205-29.</p>
<h2>Notes</h2>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/salvatore-proietti">Salvatore Proietti</a>, <a href="/tags/proietti">Proietti</a>, <a href="/tags/joseph-mcelroy">Joseph McElroy</a>, <a href="/tags/mcelroy">mcelroy</a>, <a href="/tags/haraway">haraway</a>, <a href="/tags/hayles">hayles</a>, <a href="/tags/levi">levi</a>, <a href="/tags/bakhtin">bakhtin</a>, <a href="/tags/toffler">toffler</a>, <a href="/tags/chomsky">Chomsky</a>, <a href="/tags/tabbi">tabbi</a>, <a href="/tags/wilson">wilson</a>, <a href="/tags/american">american</a>, <a href="/tags/contemporary">contemporary</a>, <a href="/tags/fiction">fiction</a>, <a href="/tags/narrative">narrative</a>, <a href="/tags/mcluhan">mcluhan</a>, <a href="/tags/barth">barth</a>, <a href="/tags/calvino">calvino</a>, <a href="/tags/science-fiction">science fiction</a>, <a href="/tags/cyborg">cyborg</a>, <a href="/tags/ballard">ballard</a>, <a href="/tags/clarke">clarke</a>, <a href="/tags/hjortsberg">Hjortsberg</a>, <a href="/tags/vonnegut">vonnegut</a>, <a href="/tags/no">No</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator1093 at http://electronicbookreview.comHenry Jenkins responds in turnhttp://electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/well-syuzheted
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Henry Jenkins</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2004-01-09</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-riposte-to field-type-node-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Riposte to:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/thread/firstperson/lazzi-fair">Game Design as Narrative Architecture</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Markku Eskelinen argues that any discussion of ludology must deal with Gonzalo Frasca’s 1998 address to the Digital Arts and Culture conference, so let me begin with a quotation from that address:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Literary theory and narratology have been helpful to understand cybertexts and videogames…. The fact is that these computer programs share many elements with stories: characters, chained actions, endings, settings…. In this paper, we propose to explore videogames and cybertexts as games. Our intention is not to replace the narratologic approach, but to complement it. We want to better understand what is the relationship with narrative and videogames; their similarities and differences. [Frasca]</p>
<p>Or, to refer to another of the texts Eskelinen urges us to consider, Espen Aarseth’s <span class="booktitle">Cybertext</span>: “To claim that there is no difference between games and narrative is to ignore essential qualities of both categories. And yet, as this study tries to show, the difference is not clear-cut, and there is significant overlap between the two.” [Aarseth] Both of these “ur-texts” for ludology, then, adapt a position not radically different from the one which I took in my essay - claiming that both narratology and ludology are required if we are going to adequately understand the hybrid quality of contemporary computer and videogames; that games can not be reduced to stories but that we also need to hold onto the tools of narratology if we want to understand the “similarities and differences” or points of “overlap” between games and stories.</p>
<p>Now, by contrast, let’s consider the opening of Eskelinen’s <span class="booktitle">First Person</span> essay:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">So if there already is or soon will be a legitimate field for computer game studies, this field is also very open to intrusions and colonizations from the already organized scholarly tribes. Resisting and beating them is the goal of our first survival game in this paper, as what these emerging studies need is independence, or at least relative independence.</p>
<p>One can’t help but note that Eskelinen’s position is significantly more rigid than the one adopted by Frasca and Aarseth. Far from seeing ludology as a “complement” to narratology, Eskelinen wants to barricade the gates against any foreign “intrusions and colonizations” and throw away the key. Eskelinen’s contributions depict him as someone defending his turf against the aggressive assault of narratologists who are “seeking and finding stories, and nothing but stories, everywhere.” What I want to suggest is that Eskelinen is expending a great deal of emotional and intellectual energy combating phantoms of his own imagination.</p>
<p>I feel a bit like Travis Bickle when I ask Eskelinen, “Are you talking to me?” For starters, I don’t consider myself to be a narratologist at all. I certainly draw on narrative theory as <span class="lightEmphasis">one</span> conceptual model among many for understanding computer and video games; I have written other essays which make little or no use of narrative theory, focusing on the fit between game play and more traditional backyard play cultures. <cite id="note_1">See, for example, Henry Jenkins, “Complete Freedom of Movement: Video Games As Gendered Playspaces,” in Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins (Ed.), <span class="booktitle">From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games</span> (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998).</cite> When I first introduced my concept of “spatial stories,” I was arguing against film theorists simply cookie-cutting their models onto games without regard to the centrality of spatial aesthetics to games. [Jenkins 1993] I have written elsewhere about the ways that performance and spectacle in early sound comedy take precedence over narrative and characterization. [Jenkins 1992] Ultimately, my interest is in mapping the aesthetic norms that constitute different forms of popular culture and in almost every case, narrative exists alongside, competes against, struggles with, and is often subordinate to alternative aesthetic logics that are fundamentally anti- or non-narrative in character. Eskelinen is correct to note that games have a long history, so does magic, dance, architecture, <span class="foreignWord">ars erotica</span>, and so forth, which exist alongside storytelling as important cultural activities. These various alternative traditions are never completely autonomous from each other, but come together and move apart in different ways, at different times, in different cultures. My goal is not to reduce games to narrative but to explore the unstable relationship between a range of different transmedia logics - narrative, games, spectacle, performance, spatiality, affect, etc.</p>
<p>In that sense, I would see Jon McKenzie’s concept of games as “experience design” to be an equally appropriate framework for thinking about the medium as my conception of “narrative architecture.” Both would need to be understood as provisional terms which clarify certain aspects of the phenomenon while masking others; none are fully adequate for the object of study, but they will do as starting points around which further refinements will need to be made. <span class="booktitle">First Person</span> takes as a central theme the question of games and stories, and so for this essay I have used narrative as a point of entry. There is no question in my mind that current narrative theory would need to be significantly rethought before it can be applied to computer and videogames.</p>
<p>Eskelinen asks for a definition of terms. <cite id="note_2">For the record, I do offer a definition of story: “Russian formalist critics make a useful distinction between plot (or <span class="foreignWord">syuzhet</span>) which refers to, in Kristen Thompson’s terms, `the structured set of all causal events as we see and hear them presented in the film itself,’ and story (or <span class="foreignWord">fabula</span>), which refers to the viewer’s mental construction of the chronology of those events.” Seeing story as a mental construct, one that may exist in the head of the artist at the beginning of the creative process or the consumer at the end, enables us to imagine situations where stories are evoked and not told and to see at least some games as involved in a narrative economy even if they are not structured as traditional narratives. Story is not “content,” according to this model, but the end point of a process through which readers encounter, work upon, and work through various textual cues. I would thus agree that the narrational process of computer games is significantly different from the process by which we consume books, films, theatrical plays, or comic strips (but then, there are significant differences in the way narration works in each of these other media as well). Yet, I would still argue that many games draw on player’s existing familiarity with stories and encourage them to reshape their experience of play into stories at the end of the process.</cite> My essay is talking about computer and videogames as they are constituted within the current marketplace. I am making no claims about dodgeball, tiddlywinks, checkers, Legos, or golf. I am quite prepared to accept that these traditional forms of games and play have little or nothing to do with narrative at all and I would be very surprised if my essay contributed much to our understanding of them. The market category of “games,” in fact, covers an enormous ground, including activities that traditional ludologists would classify as play, sports, simulations, and toys, as well as traditional games. Some, but certainly not all, of these products also make bids on telling stories; storytelling is part of what they are marketing and part of what consumers think they are buying when they invest in this software.</p>
<p>These computer games, then, are a strange, still unstable, and still undertheorized hybrid between games and narratives. They are a border case for any study of narrative, but they are also a border case for any study of games. Computer games are a bit like duck-billed platypuses, a species which, as Harriet Ritvo has documented, confounded early naturalists; some of them denied that such a creature could exist and denounced early reports as fraud, while others sought to erase all ambiguities about its status, trivializing any problems in classifying this species - which has a duck bill, web feet, and lays eggs - as mammals. Jon McKenzie accurately summarizes my position: “games are indeed not narratives, not films, not plays - but they’re also not-not-narratives, not-not-films, not-not-plays.” In the end, the zoological discipline has decided that platypuses are not birds; yet, we will not really get why platypuses are such strange mammals if we don’t know what a bird is.</p>
<p>For that reason, the analogies I draw in the essay are between games and other kinds of works - amusement park rides, musicals, <span class="foreignWord">commedia dell’arte</span>, travel narratives, world-making in fantasy and science fiction, hero myths - which have fit uncomfortably within the narratological tradition, suggesting that if we look at how narrative theory has struggled with the ambiguities of these other border cases, it may tell us something about the ways that narrative theory may and may not contribute to an understanding of computer and video games. Drawing on these analogies to narrative border cases, I try to describe some of the ways that games relate to larger story traditions in our culture - suggesting that they may evoke atmospheres or content from stories; that they may contribute something to a larger story system; that they may have narrative information buried within them; that they may create an environment ripe with narrative possibilities; that they may enact micronarratives or borrow certain structures from the larger spatial storytelling tradition; and so forth. At no point in the essay do I ever suggest that games can be reduced to story and nothing but story. All I am rejecting is the desire of certain ludologists to throw the baby out with the bath water.</p>
<p>Near the end of his comments, Eskelinen proposes a range of examples that he takes to be a <span class="foreignWord">reductio ad absurdum</span> of my essay’s arguments. It might be helpful to take one of his cases and break it down. Are gardens spatial stories? We can agree that they are not. Most gardens are spaces - with little or no narrative interest at all. Some of those spaces may be designed in such a way as to enable certain life events to unfold - such as hidden nooks where lovers may meet - and thus gardens have been the settings for many stories. There is a tradition of using gardens to recreate spaces from fictional stories; I am thinking about the Bible gardens which dot the roadside of my native south or the fairy gardens that are popular throughout Europe. Here, we would say that those gardens operate in relation to a larger narrative economy. In most cases, however, these gardens are simply recreating spaces or vignettes from stories. They evoke stories, but they are not stories. In the case of some Bible gardens, these vignettes are arranged in a narrative sequence designed to unfold the story of Christ’s martyrdom. As they do so, they start to move towards the borders of our current understanding of narrative. I would argue that such gardens could be an interesting limit case for narrative theory, even if we would not be able to fully account for them without also drawing insights from landscape architecture. Similarly, to draw on another of his examples, there are some books which do not simply recount the playing of games, but use things, like chess moves, to structure their plot progression, and while we would not want to call such works games, we might argue that ludology could contribute something to our understanding of such texts. In both cases, though, Bible gardens and game books are minor strands within their larger tradition and you can discuss gardens and novels without referring to them at all. Yet, in the case of computer games, a high percentage of what is currently in the market are the digital equivalent of those Bible gardens and therefore, we need to have some way of discussing those forms of hybridity.</p>
<p>Eskelinen’s solution involves an act of purification - strip away everything that doesn’t look like a game and discuss these works purely from a ludological framework; he assumes I am following a similar logic, stripping aside everything that doesn’t look like a narrative, but I am not. I am searching for a theory nuanced enough to explain why platypuses are and are not like mammals and why games (and Bible gardens) are and are not stories. Eskelinen is involved in a particular kind of “game” - defining and defending the borders of an emerging academic discipline - and he is doing so according to some traditional rules: define terms, lay down axioms, cite core theorists, and then engage in debate around those various abstractions. We might call this game “my paradigm is bigger than your paradigm,” or “my theorist can beat up your theorist.” In the terms around which he describes it, it is a zero-sum game, where one model will ultimately win the disputed space and he’s rooting for the Ludology Vikings over the Narratology Eagles. Within academia, he may be correct to perceive his side as badly outnumbered: there has been a great deal more academic writing about narrative than about games and there’s an urgent need to develop new tools for thinking about games and play. I simply question whether it makes sense to think of knowledge production as a zero-sum game.</p>
<p>I see myself involved in a rather different exercise, attempting not to construct an academic discipline around games, but to intervene in a public debate among game designers, game critics, and game players - as well as policy makers and other media producers and consumers - about the current state and future development of an emergent and hybrid form of “interactive entertainment.” As we do so, I think we need to start with specific examples, rather than broad abstractions; we need to recognize the impurity and instability of the current forms and respond to them by drawing on the broadest possible range of theoretical tools and historical analogies. None of those theories are going to be ready to wear off the shelf, none of the analogies are fully functional, and each will require a good deal of retrofitting to be adequate to the task of understanding our object of study. In such a situation, there are no clear boundaries, no pure theories and traditions, and no stable formulations. What is needed, as McKenzie suggests, is a more exploratory, less bookish - dare I say, more ludic - spirit. Most game designers know a great deal more about the theory of play and games than they know about narrative. Most of the game design books currently on the market tell little or nothing about character and plot. Yet, these practitioners consistently express a hunger to know more about traditional storytelling; sessions on games and narrative have been among the most highly attended at industry conferences. My essay’s arguments came out of that dialogue with the game design community rather than within a more academic context.</p>
<h2>References</h2>
<p>Aarseth, Espen. <span class="booktitle">Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature</span> (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1997)</p>
<p>Frasca, Gonzala. “Ludology Meets Narratology: Similitude and Differences between (Video) Games and Narrative,” <a class="outbound" href="http://www.jacaranda.org/frasca/ludology.htm">http://www.jacaranda.org/frasca/ludology.htm</a></p>
<p>Jenkins, Henry. “x Logic: Placing Nintendo in Children’s Lives,” <span class="journaltitle">Quarterly Review of Film and Video</span> (August 1993).</p>
<p>—. <span class="booktitle">What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic</span> (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).</p>
<p>—. <span class="booktitle">What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic</span>. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).</p>
<p>Ritvo, Harriet. <span class="booktitle">The Platypus and the Mermaid, and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination</span>. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).</p>
<p style="text-align:right"><a class="internal" href="/thread/firstperson/introductory">back to Game Theories introduction</a></p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/markku-eskelinen">Markku Eskelinen</a>, <a href="/tags/jon-mckenzie">jon mckenzie</a>, <a href="/tags/gonzalo-frasca">gonzalo frasca</a>, <a href="/tags/narratology">narratology</a>, <a href="/tags/ludology">ludology</a>, <a href="/tags/espen-aarseth">espen aarseth</a>, <a href="/tags/cybertext">cybertext</a>, <a href="/tags/games">games</a>, <a href="/tags/gaming">gaming</a>, <a href="/tags/videogames">videogames</a>, <a href="/tags/cybertexts">cybertexts</a>, <a href="/tags/ars-erotica">ars erotica</a>, <a href="/tags/commedia-dell%E2%80%99arte">commedia dell&amp;#8217;arte</a>, <a href="/tags/science-fiction">science fiction</a>, <a href="/tags/bible">the bible</a>, <a href="/tags/jesus-christ">jesus christ</a>, <a href="/tags/hybrid-theory">hybrid theory</a>, <a href="/tags/syuzhet">syuzhet</a>, <a href="/tags/fabula">fabula</a>, <a href="/tags/causal">causal</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator975 at http://electronicbookreview.com